Economic rights of women in ancient Greece 9780852244234, 9780852243435

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Introduction (page 1)
CHAPTER 1. Types of Property (page 4)
CHAPTER 2. Acquisition (page 17)
CHAPTER 3. The Epikleros (page 25)
CHAPTER 4. Economic Authority of the Kyrios (page 48)
CHAPTER 5. Exchange and Disposition (page 61)
CHAPTER 6. The Dowry (page 74)
CHAPTER 7. Patterns in Women's Economics (page 89)
Appendix I. Size of Dowries (page 99)
Appendix II. ΙΙροίξ and Φερνή (page 100)
Appendix III. Dowry and Trousseau (page 101)
Appendix IV. Inheritance of the Dowry (page 106)
Abbreviations (page 108)
Notes (page 111)
Glossary (page 153)
Indexes (page 155)

Citation preview

Economic Rights of Women in Anctent Greece

for my parents HARRY M. SCHAPS

and ZELDA L. SCHAPS

+

Economic

Rights of Women in Ancient Greece

DAVID M.SCHAPS

at the University Press

Edinburgh

© David Schaps 1979 Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square, Edinburgh First published 1979 Paperback edition 1981 ISBN O 85224 423 I Printed in Great Britain by The Scolar Press Ltd Ilkley, Yorks

Preface The question of women’s property rights was most recently raised by Mr G. E. M. de Ste Croix a few years ago, ‘in the hope of stimulating a thorough inquiry into the whole subject’.’ I have enlarged the field of inquiry — he was discussing only classical Athens — but his article has remained the basis of my investigation. Other scholars have discussed various aspects of the problem, but there has been no comprehensive treatment since the unpublished thesis of Maud Thompson in 1906,”

and many areas have been almost entirely neglected. For the questions of Attic law I have availed myself of the standard works by Beauchet? and Lipsius, and of the more recent work by Harrison, unfortunately left incomplete at his death. Of particular value has been the edition of Isaeus by Wyse, whose copious notes serve as a constant reminder that we are dealing with the speeches of a paid advocate whose job is to persuade the judges and win cases, not — unless that will help him — to enunciate law and speak the truth. Of the three most characteristic — to us — features of Greek property law relating to women, one, the dowry, has received its definitive treatment (at least for the present) from Wolff, RE; the epiclerate* has been discussed by many scholars, none, in my opinion, offering a satisfactory explanation;> and the last, the economic power of the Kyrios, has never received the serious attention it deserves.° Lacey’s study of the Greek family has been useful, mostly in an indirect fashion; the direct effects of the family on women’s property ownership are there discussed (as is reasonable in so broad a study) only sketchily. As for the direct uses of property by women, its acquisition, management, and disposal, the only discussion of any particular value is that by Herfst, whose thesis has deservedly been the source of all ater treatments of his topic, including my own. This book as originally planned was to deal with women’s property in what seemed like a sensible order, beginning with its acquisition, continuing through exchange and ending with disposition. The nature of the information, however, has required some change. First of all, since various forms of property are treated in various ways, it was necessary to preface a chapter discussing these differences. The epiclerate, although technically perhaps a form of acquisition (but really not), demanded a chapter for itself; exchange and disposition could not be discussed before discussing the kyrieia, the so-called ‘guardianship’ of Greek women;

Preface vi

and the dowry, although it technically (at least in Athens) was not the woman’s property at all, also required a full chapter. If the structure no longer yields a tripartite division, I hope it will at least yield a comprehensible order. The recent awakening of interest in the history of women may bring this book into the hands of people whose Greek is not ona level with their English, and for their convenience [ have translated all quotations of sources, even where the text or meaning was uncertain. I rely upon their discretion to refrain from attempting any scholarly use of the sources I have quoted in translation without acquainting themselves with the original. In the scholarly world I am much indebted to Professor G. W. Bowersock of Harvard for advising me, and to Mr G. E. M. de Ste Croix of Oxford for reading parts of earlier drafts and offering valuable suggestions and encouragement; a further kind of debt was defrayed with the assistance of the School of History of Tel Aviv University and the Classics Department of Swarthmore College, to whom I am grateful. I am . further obliged to Professors Helen North and Martin Ostwald for introducing me to the study of the classics, and for their continued help since I left their care. As for personal debts, I owe this book directly to the education of my parents, the help of my wife, and the encouragement of both. It is one of my smallest debts to them.

Contents Introduction, 1

CHAPTER 1. Typesof Property 4 Land, 4; Slaves, 7; Movables, 9; Money, 13

CHAPTER 2. Acquisition 17 Production and services, 18; Gifts, 20; Inheritance by will, 20; Intestate succession, 22 CHAPTER 3. The &pikleros 25 Definition, 25; Ownership of the estate, 26; Marriage to an outsider, 28; Adopted sons, 31; The epikleros and the oikos, 32; Rich epikleroi, 33; Epidikasia, 33; The married epikleros, 35; Poor epikleroi, 37; Redress, 38; The function of the epiclerate, 39; Epikleroi outside of Athens, 42

CHAPTER 4. Economic Authority of the Kyrios 48 Transactions ‘with her kyrios’, 48; The Kyrios at Athens, 52; The kyrios at Gortyn, 58

CHAPTER 5. Exchange and Disposition 61 Trade, 61; Lending and borrowing, 63; Wills, 67; Gifts, 70; Dedications, 71

CHAPTER 6. The Dowry 74 The dowry at Athens, 74; Ownership and control, 75; The dowry and economic class, 77; Dowries of the poor, 78; The dowry after marriage, 81; Old age, 83; The dowry outside of Athens, 84 CHAPTER 7. Patterns in Women’s Economics 89 Greek society and Greek law, 89; The law and the individual, 91; Paternalism in Athens, 92; Patterns in Greece at large, 96 Appendix I. Size of Dowries 99

Appendix II. pot and Pepyn 100 Appendix III. Dowry and Trousseau 101 Appendix IV. Inheritance of the Dowry 106 Abbreviations, 108 Notes, 111 Glossary, 153 Indexes, 155

Introduction History is the invention of men. Most of the characters in the history _ books are male, not simply because it is men who write the books, but because the interests of history — politics, warfare, law, commerce — have in most times and places been the domain of men. The literature through which we study history was written largely (and for Greece, overwhelmingly) by men. Lastly, the desire to perpetuate the memory of the past, and the corresponding desire to have one’s own memory perpetuated, has tended in the past to characterize men more than women. Women, engaged largely (though never exclusively) in the production and training of the next generation, seem to have been less anxious lest their children forget them. They do not seem to have felt the need to have their own names and deeds inscribed in public places, or remembered by the entire populace, though they may have nurtured such hopes for their sons. There were, of course, exceptions. There was Sappho, and there was the Olympic victress Cynisca, and there were others, including those who, like Xanthippe and Aspasia, owe their fame to the men with whom they were connected. But it would be possible to write a history of Greece with only passing intimations of the fact that there are two sexes; and indeed, much history has been and will continue to be written thus. A political history could not be written otherwise. Social, cultural, and economic history, on the other hand, can hardly ignore women, who constitute half of society. It is easy to follow the lead of our sources and say what women did not do: they did not vote, did not, if they were respectable, attend the men’s drinking-parties, did not (if they could afford enough servants) go out in public unaccompanied. With the women out of the way, we are then free to describe the assemblies, the drinkingparties, and the market, about which the sources have so much more to say. It is much more difficult, because it rarely interested the men who wrote history or literature, to determine what, indeed, the women did do; but until we know this, our view of ancient Athens, or ancient Greece, will be lopsided and false. I propose to deal with a part of the question only, and to investigate women’s relationship to property and possessions, both real and movable: how they acquired them, how much they could acquire, and what dealings, direct or indirect, they had with them. The questions are not nugatory, for there were, as we shall see, rich women and poor women,

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 2 women who dominated their families’ economic lives and women who were excluded from them. I shall discuss only the place of women in what we now call ‘economics’, the transactions taking place in the society at large; I shall not discuss, but shall take for granted, their place in the household economy (what the Greeks meant by the word “‘economics’), which was a position of importance both to themselves and to their families. Nevertheless, the reader should keep in mind throughout that the functions performed by women within the family — production of clothing, preparation of food, and production and care of children — were the major preoccupation of women in Greece, as indeed in most societies until the industrial revolution relieved them of the first; and that they formed then, as they form today, the economic basis for all the society’s activities. I have restricted my study to mainland Greece and the Aegean islands, from the earliest alphabetic inscriptions to the fall of Corinth in the year 146 before the Christian era, preferring to treat Greek culture on its home territory before attempting to explain its fate in other lands.’ I have excluded the Hellenistic queens and slaves and prostitutes; each of these had a very different economic status from that of the ordinary free Greek woman, and each must be considered separately .” I did not limit my study to women’s ‘ownership’ of property, because the meaning of this term varied so greatly from place to place that any attempt at a uniform definition would have excluded a good dea! of relevant material, or else run roughshod over the definitions that the Greeks themselves understood. In some places, as the book will make clear, women owned property and were free to dispose of it; in others, their ownership was so restricted as to allow them little discretion in its management or disposal. In yet other places, similar property may not have been considered ‘theirs’ at all — but legal restrictions on the person who did own it made sure it stayed with the woman, and sometimes even gave her a measure of real control over it. I have included all of these categories within the scope of the work; but I have generally referred to property as “belonging to’ a woman only if the local laws, as far as I can determine, considered it hers — whatever other restrictions they may have placed on it. My work has been based on a survey of both literary and epigraphic evidence; I have attempted to find every literary passage or inscription that could shed light on the topic, and while I should be surprised if nothing had escaped me, I hope not to have missed anything of such importance as to affect materially the value of the study or its conclusions. As any writer of social or economic history knows, the sources, while far from barren, are not cooperative. They come from different places and different times; they are of widely various sorts. We know, at least

Introduction 3

partially, what the law was in Gortyn, on Crete, in the sixth century; we know what percentage of the land in Laconia belonged to women in the fourth century; we have the speeches of lawyers from Athenian courts of the same time; we have temple-accounts from Delos from a somewhat later period; we have manumissions of Delphi from a period later still. Only in rare cases, however, do we have comparable documents from the same place at different times, or the same time at different places, or even two different sorts of document from the same place and time. Whatever differences we find may therefore be attributed to geographical factors, to historical factors, or to the accidents of preservation. To find the truth behind such documents — and to avoid falsehood when there are so many easy explanations — is difficult and uncertain; and the reader is cautioned against presuming my conclusions to be the only ones possible. One particular inconvenience must be mentioned. The manumission documents from Delphi, Phocis, Aetolia, Boeotia, and Thessaly date

from about 200 until well into the Roman period. The limit set for my study cuts a rather arbitrary line through these documents, including the earlier and excluding the later members of what is essentially a continuous series. Difficulties of precise dating, furthermore, have made careful chronological separation impossible. I have nevertheless maintained the separation as best I could, rather than be drawn further outside my area.

The reader may also be warned against the statistics drawn from tabulation of inscriptions. My subject matter has required thatI be very _ sceptical about restorations. I have usually counted only those names whose sex was guaranteed independently of the subject of study: to presume that every talasiourgos was a woman would be reasonable in normal circumstances, but is inadmissible when the inquiry is itself asking what jobs women performed. I had to make many delicate judgments, and I cannot guarantee that another man’s count would tally precisely with mine. In no case, however, is the room for variation sufficient to alter the conclusions drawn.

I Types of Property In Athenian law, two concepts of ownership competed with each other. According to one, property belonged to the household, and the head of the family controlled it only by virtue of his position within the home: he was called the kyrios of his lands just as he was the kyrios of his wife and children. His rights over his property were restricted accordingly: he could neither make a will nor adopt a son if he would thereby remove the inheritance from his legitimate sons,’ and the dowry which was given to him with his wife left the family again in case of divorce. But as early as the time of Solon we see property being treated, at least partially, as if it were ‘a man’s own’:* he may do anything he pleases with it during his lifetime,* and he is allowed to make a will if there are no sons. In the courts of the fourth century, orators regularly speak of property as belonging to so-and-so, and deal with the law as if the property were wholly private; but the terms of the law themselves continued, in the main, to reflect the old concept. In so far as the first, ‘family’ concept of ownership held sway, property could never legally belong to a woman unless she were kyria of a family. There is no evidence that such a thing was possible at Athens; the only mention of such women in the literature* is rhetorical and selfcontradictory. It is true that, since the husband’s rights to the property stemmed from his family position, they depended on the maintenance of the family; in certain cases — a woman’s dowry and the estate of a man who left only daughters — this fact attached the property to the woman in a way which gave her considerable de facto rights over it. But

| she did not thereby become a legal owner. Was she ever a legal owner in Athens? Was she so elsewhere in Greece, where the oikos, the restricted family, did not occupy the same position of importance? The answer, as we shall see, depends on what sort of property we are speaking of, how much we restrict ourselves to the terms of the law — and how much the Greeks bound themselves to those terms.

Land. There is no property as secure as land. It is very difficult to steal; it produces an income, under proper management, year after year; houses can be built on it, or places of business established. A person who has unrestricted title to a sizeable plot of free land has an economic independence that money alone can rarely give. For these reasons, land

| tenure is often more closely regulated, and more restricted, than the

Types of Property BS) tenure of other forms of property. If there was anything that a woman could not own, we should expect it to be land; and the evidence indicates that at Athens, at least, this was the case, with exceptions that are more apparent than real. In the endless litigation of Demosthenes and Isaeus, not a single mention occurs of a woman who is kyna of land: Stratocles’ daughter, when she was adopted by Theophon, became heiress to a field worth two talents,” but Stratocles was its Kyrios during her minority,° and it must have passed to her husband on her marriage. The younger Phylomache was at one time heiress of Hagnias’ estate,’ but her husband, who was her kyrios,® presumably became Kyrios of the estate as well. In the hekatoste inscriptions of Athens, recording payments of tax on sales of land by organizations, clans, and demes, we find forty-three men among the buyers, but no women at all.” The poletai, whose responsibility it was to sell confiscated property and to lease the mines at Laureion,

mention in their inscriptions eighty-eight men as buyers or previous | owners of confiscated estates, as owners of estates with mines underground, and as owners of neighbouring fields and houses.’° Here, indeed, four women are mentioned, but only obliquely. Two are identified by their husbands’ names: : In Nape among the lands of Charmylus’ wife, next to which : the land of Alypetus’ wife, on the north Teleson of Sounion : on the east : land of Teleson of Sounion, on the west Epicrates of Pallene : Lessee : Epicles of Sphettus : 20 drachmas :"! I doubt whether either of the wives mentioned here was direct owner of

the land. Charmylus was dead, and his estate presumably in the hands of | his children’s guardians;'* his widow, who is referred to under his name, cannot have inherited from him — his children were his heirs — and the land must have been mortgaged as security for her dowry: it was apparently still in the hands of the guardians, awaiting either the return of the dowry to her father’s family or her remarriage.'? Alypetus, on the other

hand, seems to have been alive;’* but it is quite possible that this land, | too, was in fact his, mortgaged for his wife’s dowry. It may have been mentioned in her name to distinguish it from his other land in Nape. Two more women are mentioned: ‘(Ae)schylus’ daughter’,”> if she was a landowner, was probably an orphan awaiting adjudication as an epikleros '° (so that her property, too, will have been in the hands of guardians), and ‘Boutes’ daughter’’’ may not have been a landowner at all. The absence of women is just as pronounced in those inscriptions that describe charges on real property. The inscriptions of prasis epi lysei, a form of fictitious ‘sale’ which amounted, in effect, to a loan secured by the land (the ‘seller’ accepted the money immediately, but had the right to ‘repurchase’ the property within a fixed period — and in the meantime, it remained in his possession), mention the names of seventy-four

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 6 creditors who accepted real security: all are men.’® Six formulae of land lease have come down to us with the names of the lessees: all are men.’” Women do, indeed, appear on the mortgage-stones of Attica, but only to indicate that the land in question is security for their dowries — that is, that it guarantees payment of a debt from their husbands to their former families in case of divorce.”°

Such was the situation in Athens: the inscriptions of Delos present a similar picture. The tenants of some eighteen houses and twenty-one estates in the possession of the sanctuary are recorded over a period of a hundred and sixty years, and not one is a woman.”' Here, however, the exceptions are more significant, for one woman does pay interest for land (apparently land by which the previous owner had secured a loan),”’ and a house is referred to as ‘the house that used to be Gorgo’s’.*’ However exceptional these women may be, the first, at least, looks very much like an outright owner. A man was her kyrios, and under Athenian law, would have been kyrios of the land. The overwhelming male control of property suggests that the same held for Delian law, but there is a hint here that the de facto situation no longer matched the law completely. Our evidence from other parts of Greece is quite different. Most striking is the case of Lacedaemon, where, as Aristotle complains, almost twofifths of all land belonged to women.”* At Gortyn, although the right to inherit certain categories of real property and cattle was restricted, in the normal case, to males,”> it seems clear that women could own landed property as well as movables.” ° There is, moreover, some indication that they commonly did so, for women landowners were taken into account in the legislation: a divorced woman received ‘half of the produce, if it be from her own property’, a provision which apparently refers to agricultural produce.”’ There is no indication of just how much land women owned, but the common, and reasonable, assumption is that it must have been a good deal. The property confiscated at Delphi in 191 by order of the consul M’. Acilius included four tracts of land (out of twenty-four) and five houses (out of forty-six) belonging to women.”® At Larissa in Thessaly, after a period of wars and depopulation, some third of the landholders seem to have been women.’ ’ A register of land sales from Ceos, dating from the third or fourth century, includes a number of women;*? in the records from third- or second-century Tenos, women are quite as common as men.°*' A few individual owners, from various localities, are also known to us: Arete, daughter of Aristandros, dedicated half a garden, ‘which she had bought from the Aegosthenitae for a thousand drachmas’, in Megara in the third century;** Epicteta of Thera speaks of ‘the estates in my possession which I myself have bought’, and a letter of Ptolemy Euergetes mentions ‘the lands which Timacrita used to own’%* in the same place. A grant of citizenship to a woman in Crannon (in Thessaly)

Types of Property 7 includes enktesis, the right to own land in Crannon.* Aristotle himself, according to Diogenes Laertius, left his mistress a choice of houses, one in Chalcis or his ancestral home in Stagiri.2° Not even in Lacedaemon, we may note, did the women own nearly as much land as the men, and for most of the cities of Greece there is no evidence at all; but there were clearly very many places where women held much more real estate than they did at Athens, and they seem to have held it in their own name. This is a pattern that will repeat itself; for not everywhere was the family as strongly idealized and institutionalized as at Athens. In Sparta and Crete, the presence of the other, conflicting institutions (the communal life for which these places were famous) seriously weakened the hold of the family on its members, and the law reflected the difference. In northern Greece, the law appears not to have followed the Athenian model, and we may presume that there, too, there were corresponding social differences. In these circumstances, it is well to keep in mind that the entire legal conception may have been different. For Gortyn, at least, it is certain that the property law conceived of each member of the family as an independent member of society, with his own rights and hence his own property; the family itself was an aggregate of these members, not a single unit whose rights and responsibilities applied to the family as a whole. In law, such a family is not simply a weaker version of the Athenian family; it is an entirely different institution. But the difference in practice, as we shall now see, was not as thorough as we might have

expected.

Slaves. We find no signs of doubt between husband and wife as to the ownership of land (though we ourselves are often enough perplexed); but in other areas, ownership is likely to have been more ambiguous, at least as long as the marriage lasted. We shall occasionally find, as we look at non-real property, that the legal question of ownership wears a different aspect from that of ability to use, or even to dispose of the item. Our most abundant evidence for the ownership of slaves comes from the numerous manumission-inscriptions of the late third and second centuries. These inscriptions, found throughout the mainland of Greece, leave no doubt as to the capacity of the Hellenistic woman to free a slave — and, by implication, to own him. The largest collection of these inscriptions is that found at Delphi: of the 491 manumittors identifiable in inscriptions before 150 B.C.E., 368 are men and 123 women.*’ The inscriptions from the rest of Greece show a similar picture: 516 men and 166 women.*” The competence of the manumittors, however, seems to vary: while most of the inscriptions record manumission by a single person or a set of partners, a number record the presence of third parties ‘present’ or ‘agreeing’ (parontes, syneudokeontes, or syneuaristeontes). The significance of each of these terms need not concern us now; for the

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece & moment it will suffice to note that there were places where the woman was able to free the slave without requiring either the explicit approval or even the presence of a man.®” In inscriptions of freedmen (who used, in Greece as in Rome, their former master’s name in place of a patronymic) we find some who call themselves the freedmen of their former mistress, but these are not as common as the manumission-inscriptions would have led us to believe.” Whether a slave was freed by his master, his mistress with the approval of his master, or his master and mistress jointly, seems to have depended upon different factors in different cases. It is unlikely that all the manumissions by husband and wife acting together deal with slaves who were bought jointly; in fact we have, to my knowledge, no record of anything in Greece ever having been sold to a couple — a point perhaps worth noting: we have places where the property was owned by the family’s kyrios and places where each member owned his own property, but I know of no indication that there was any place in mainland Greece where the members of the family were considered equal partners in the property, as they are in many places today, though such relationship — guaranteed by contract — does appear in the papyri of Egypt.*’ The slaves manumitted jointly in the inscriptions were probably bought by the husband (perhaps in some cases by the wife), or born to a slave who had been so acquired, but served them both; when the time came to liberate them, both master and mistress performed the mamumission. In other cases, however, a slave who serves a woman is freed by a man,” or one who serves both husband and wife is freed by the husband only;*? here it would seem that manumission is performed by the husband either because he acquired the slave originally, or in his capacity as master of the household, regardless of the slave’s duties.” This variation in the manumittor does not seem to be temporal or geographical; it probably reflects the personal condition of the slave and the household that owned him. In general, it was to the slave’s advantage to have all possible claimants to him agree to the manumission, and we do find inscriptions where an

entire family takes part, in one role or another, in the transaction; but in most cases the word — and the claim — of the master of the house will have been strong enough to ensure his freedom. For other slaves, the relationship with one member of the household was close enough to exclude the likelihood of other claims, so that a woman’s personal attendant was not afraid of being claimed by her mistress’ husband once her mistress freed her. Surely, too, some husbands insisted more than others on their rights as head of the household. It is not likely that all these manumittors would have been able to vindicate their title in case of divorce;** the law-courts presumably used a more consistent test of ownership than the inscriptions do. Nevertheless, we could hardly have had this number of women manumitting were there any serious legal bar to a

Types of Property 9 woman’s holding slaves. All this evidence, however, bears only upon the later Hellenistic period, and none of it comes from Athens; a point that encourages some caution, since we have already seen that, in the matter of land ownership, Athenian women were more restricted than their sisters elsewhere. There are, however, some indications. Nicarete, a freedwoman, could purchase slaves and sell them in Corinth at the beginning of the fourth century,*’ and Neaera, herself a freedwoman, had her title to slaves that she had purchased confirmed by a group of Athenian arbiters.*® Theodote, a hetaera (as, for that matter, was Neaera; Nicarete was a madam), owned neither field nor house nor factory, but she had ‘many beautiful serving maids’, as did her mother.” Archippe, the wife of the banker Pasio, received maids — presumably women who had always served her — in her husband’s will.°° But the title of an Athenian woman to her slaves does

not seem to have been as strong as that of the women in the northern manumissions. The records of the ‘manumission bowls’ dedicated by freedmen, records which survive from the end of the fourth century, mention 194 manumittors whose sex is certain and all are men.° ' These dedications, which record the outcome of what was at least formally a judicial procedure,>* must reflect the legal disabilities of women in Athenian courts; they cannot be considered as a proof that no women owned slaves. In at least one case of a man and a woman pressing a claim toa Slave, the slave did not become the possession of either, nor, as far as can be told, did the case ever reach court.°* But Theophrastus, a Lesbian who lived in Athens, presumes that a lady who had brought a large dowry could still be dependent upon her husband for her personal attendants;° * and it is probable that the household slaves remained legally attached to the household and its kyrios, not to the mistress whom they served. Whatever the legal restrictions, however, it is clear that a young girl’s personal attendants might in fact accompany her throughout her life, and surely some did so.>5

Movables. If legal rights to slaves are occasionally unclear, legal rights to movables are virtually impossible to determine in the absence of a court case. Regardless of whose money is spent on a dress, it is the wife who will call it hers; and if she should choose to dedicate it to a god or give it away to a friend, her husband isn’t likely to prevent her — though he may raise difficulties about replacing it. For this reason most of our information is useless as regards establishment of legal title: dedications, and non-legal references in the literature, can tell us only what we should have assumed in any case, that a woman had practical title to her clothing and jewelry. Movables that are not sex-linked, on the other hand — furniture, food, pots and pans — are shared as long as the marriage lasts. What happened to them when the marriage dissolved? We must rely on indirect

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 10 evidence, all of it Athenian. We may note at the outset that virtually all the movables ‘owned’ by women in the Attic orators fall under the category of himatia kai chrysia, ‘clothing and jewelry’. Zobia, a metic, is able to provide Aristogeiton with ‘a little tunic and a cloak’, in addition to eight drachmas, to support him in his flight.°° Neaera removes from Phrynio’s house himatia kai chrysia and two slaves; the arbitrators permit her to keep some of what she has taken.°’ The Thirty Tyrants take from Polemarchus’ wife ‘gold earrings, which had been in her possession when she first entered (Polemarchus’) household’.** The only item other than clothing and jewelry that we hear of belonging to a citizen woman is a phiale of Polyeuctus’ wife’s, which his daughter and son-in-law give as security on a loan.°? In two places furniture is mentioned: Socrates marvels not only at Theodote’s clothing and servants, but notes ‘that the house was generously furnished in other respects as well’. Theodote is, of course, a hetaera, with no husband to provide (or to claim) house or furnishings; but it is clear from her case that the possession of movables by a woman was not of itself illegal or impossible. Another woman claims the furniture of her house, ‘saying that it was hers, having been assessed as part of her dowry’® — a statement which makes it clear that the furniture was not hers in any legal sense.™ Now, ‘clothing and jewelry’ are not collocated by accident; they are a _ technical term for the personal accoutrements brought along by the bride into the husband’s house. Sometimes they were included in the dowry, sometimes not; in the former case they had to be returned to the bride’s family in case of divorce or childless death, in the latter — technically — not. But a wife remembered what was part of her trousseau. Polemarchus’ wife’s earrings were those that she had had when she first entered the household, and Lysias is careful to mention it,” not merely as an artistic touch, recalling the wedding in the narration of Polemarchus’ death, but also to indicate that the earrings were really his wife’s, not a gift by which he was trying to protect his property from confiscation. Legally, however, the Thirty Tyrants had a good claim in treating them as his, as we see from Isaeus and from Demosthenes. The speaker of Isaeus 2 attempts to prove that his mother’s divorce from Menecles was amicable: ‘Menecles returned her dowry . . . and the clothing which had been in her possession when she married him, and the jewelry, whatever there was, he gave to her’.™ He ‘returned’ her dowry (to her legal kyrios, not to her), but simply ‘gave her’ her garments and jewelry, although he had received both at the time of the wedding. Again in the will of Pasio: ‘I give my wife Archippe to Phormio, and I give along with Archippe as a dowry the talent owed to me at Peparethus, and the talent (owed to me) here, an apartment

Types of Property 1] house worth a hundred minae, maids, and the jewelry, and whatever else she has in (my house), all of these I give to Archippe’.® It is not clear in this case where the dowry ends and the gift to Archippe begins, but it is certain that epididomi, the normal expression for giving a dowry ‘along with’ a woman as used in the beginning of the passage, cannot be equivalent to Archippéi diddmi, ‘I give to Archippe’ at the end.™ The reason for the difference in terminology is that the dowry belonged to the husband only as long as the wife did, that is, for the duration of the marriage, whereas the trousseau, and anything else not assessed as part of the dowry, belonged to him permanently and could not be recovered in case of death or divorce. The ‘assessment’ of the items included in the dowry established the cash value that was returnable; nothing more could be claimed, as Isaeus states expressly: ‘If a person should give something without assessing it (in the total value of the dowry), then if the wife should divorce the husband or if the husband should divorce the wife, as far as the law is concerned, the giver cannot exact payment of anything which he gave without assessing it as part of the dowry’.©” This was the case heneka tou nomou,®** as far as the law was concerned.

But in point of fact, the clothing and jewelry probably remained with the woman in any event. At the conclusion of a happy marriage, as the two above are alleged to have been, they would be presented to the wife; if the divorce was not amicable, her new kyrios would have to pay for them, but she would take them anyway, as Spudias’ wife had when leaving her previous husband: “Spudias’, complains his rival at law, *... received his wife from Leocrates while she was in possession of the jewelry and clothing (echousan ta chrysia kai ta himatia), for which Polyeuctus had paid over to Leocrates (at the time of the divorce, when she returned to Polyeuctus’ household) more than a thousand drachmas’.®” There is no evidence of a husband actually keeping the trousseau itself, although he surely had a legal right to do so.” The contrast between the legal and the actual status of the trousseau illustrates the normal rights of a married woman to movables. On the one hand, her legal claim was very limited: in case of divorce or childless death, the husband or his heirs had to restore her dowry and nothing else. We know of no legal procedure by which other possessions of the wife’s could be recovered from the husband, nor do we know of any such claim that was ever made. Even the property that she had owned before the wedding was not legally hers after the marriage, but her husband’s; this may well have been equally true of any property that she had obtained while in his household. On the other hand, there was in actuality little likelihood that she would be parted from her personal belongings, whatever happened to her, and if she took them with her illegally, it was the responsibility of her Kyrios to pay for them, rather

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 12 than her responsibility to return them. When, however, we begin to deal with objects that might be of value to her husband, such as furniture, her legal disabilities will have carried more weight; and for this reason we rarely find anything other than clothing and jewelry in the possession of married women, though furniture might be included in the dowry. Once the marriage was terminated, the woman passed to another oikos, separating her property from her husband’s, and so the return of the trousseau (which in effect meant the renunciation of claims against her new kyrios) could take place by direct gift to her. The real, as opposed to the legal, situation is best illustrated by a relationship that was not a marriage at all. Neaera was a freedwoman who had been living with Phrynio, and when she left him, she took with her ‘the clothing and jewelry (himatia kai chrysia again) from her house (i.e., what she had had before entering into the relationship with Phrynio) and whatever had been furnished by him to her for personal use, and two maids, Thratta and Coccaline’.”' She was behaving as a wife would have, packing up and leaving. Phrynio, on the other hand, claimed — as a husband could have — that she had no right to remove any thing, including personal effects, from his oikos. (He of course had no dowry to return.) The matter was submitted to arbitrators, who decided that she could keep those clothes, jewels, and servants ‘which had been bought for the woman herself’.’* There was nothing arbitrary about this compromise; it was based on a recognition that, since there had never been a marriage, Neaera’s property had remained independent of Phrynio’s ofkos — so he had no right to anything he had bought as a gift for her. On the other hand, whatever else he had bought — since she had no one ready to repay him, as her kyrtos would have done had she been his citizen wife — she had to return to him. In a similar situation in Menander’s Samia, Demeas tells Chrysis as he expels her from his house: “You have all of your own things; Ill give you the maids as well, Chrysis. Get out of my house’.’* ‘Her own’ property is already hers; and Demeas — more generous than Phrynio, or more anxious to get rid of his hetaera — adds her maids as a gift.’* In Athens, then, a woman had the de facto ability to own movables, but a married woman had no legal right to take them with her when she left the household; and as a result of this, few respectable women accumulated much besides personal effects. Free hetaerae, of course, since they did not marry, might own considerable possessions, as Theodote did; but in this as in other matters they were exceptional. Outside of Athens, where our literary sources do not help us, we have less evidence but less of a problem, as it is to be presumed that in any place where women could hold land, they could hold movables, and that wherever they could have money independent of their husbands’, they could use it to buy movables. Certainly Cynisca, the queen of Sparta at

Types of Property 13 the beginning of the fourth century, owned the horses that won her Olympic victory,” and the dedications from a temple at Oropus indicate that women on the very borders of Attica in the mid-third century were not limited to trinkets.” Money. There was no place in Greece, as far as we know, where women

could not have money at all; and there is epigraphical evidence to suggest that married women in much of Greece had money which they considered theirs. The property of free Gortynian women seems to have remained theirs whether they were married or single; presumably money was included.”’ Nicareta of Thespiae was married when she lent 17,585 drachmas and two obols to the town of Orchomenos at the end of the third century,” and two more inscriptions — one from Opuntian Locris in the second century,” one from Corcyra®® — mention joint gifts by husband and wife of respectable sums of money.®! In the case of Nicareta, at least, we may be reasonably certain that the money was legally hers: her husband was present as Ayrios at all the transactions, and could have managed the affair himself had the money belonged to him. At Delos, from the late third century onward, married women be- . gin appearing frequently as debtors, with their husbands present as kyrioi at the contracting of the loans.* In addition to these cases of married women, we have numerous examples of unmarried women, or of women whose marital status is unknown to us, in apparent control of large sums of money. The widow Agasigratis of Calauria toward the end of the third century left behind at least three hundred drachmas as a religious dedication — hardly a fortune, but not mere pin-money.*? Epicteta of Thera, another widow, was able to endow a cult of her family for three thousand drachmas; °* Argea of Thera had five hundred to give.®* Also notable is the epigram of Philopoemen’s granddaughter: For a sturdy wall around the temple she built for the god, and a house for the public guests; and if a woman has traded her wealth for a good reputation, no wonder; ancestral valour remains in one’s children,®° where the last two lines indicate that she has donated her own money, not simply supervised the improvements. And then there are the athletic victresses: the Lacedaemonians Cynisca and Euryleonis, Olympic victresses (the former as early, perhaps, as 396); ®’ Aristoclea of Larisa,”° and the daughters of Polycrates of Argos, Panathenaic victresses in the early second century.®” At last, just before the fall of Corinth, we find women being taxed: ‘For,’ says Polybius, ‘when (Diaeus) saw that poverty had a strong grip on the local governments because of the recent war against Sparta, he required the rich — not only the men, but the women as well — to make pledges and to contribute individually’.”°

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 14 We know from epigraphical evidence that for more than thirty-five years it had been customary in Greece to collect contributions from men in the name of the women and children of their families; ”! so it seems reasonable to presume that Diaeus’ innovation consisted of requiring direct contributions from the women. To Diaeus, a man in desperate circumstances, the women of Achaea were financially independent individuals who could be tapped as a resource for the war. None of the women mentioned were Athenians; and there is no reason to doubt that the legal conception which excluded Athenian women from property ownership applied, in principle, to money as well. But in considering the Athenian situation, it will be necessary to keep in mind the limits of the law. The law does not regulate the normal affairs of a married couple: who makes monetary decisions, who pays the grocer, who has the key to the storeroom, are questions whose answers depend on the temperaments of the partners, on the particular matter at hand, on habit, on custom — but only very indirectly on the lawcourts. What Athenian law did regulate — besides the acquisition and disp osal of money, with which we shall deal in the coming chapters — was the distribution of property when the marriage was dissolved by death or by divorce. It did so on the basis of certain legal presumptions about the nature of marriage; but we should not be surprised when the day-to-day reality does not match the legal concept. Now, if we were to describe the legal situation loosely, we should say that a married woman’s property belonged to her husband, and indeed, when the courts deal with the question after the marriage has been dissolved, it appears that way. But as long as the marriage lasted, the property belonged to the family, and the husband’s legal rights derived not from private ownership, but from his position as kyrios of the oikos. Thus the wife could manage as much, or as little, of the family finances as the head of the family would allow; and while such arrangements had no effect on anything as heavily formalized as land title, we occasionally find married women managing sums of money far beyond their legal capacity. Aphobus claimed that Demosthenes’ father had left four talents hidden in the care of his mother, as a trust-fund for the young Demosthenes.’ The claim may or may not have been true, but it was not inconceivable. When Polyeuctus died, it was one of his married daughters who paid the funeral expenses; but it was her husband — who went to court to force the other daughter’s husband to pay her share.” Archippe, after her first husband Pasio’s death, gave two thousand drachmas to her children by her second husband Phormio; the legal rights of the case are not at all clear — it was successfully challenged by Pasio’s son Apollodorus”* — but she clearly had the money in fact, if not in law. Archippe was an exceptionally rich woman; but it appears to have

Types of Property 15 been quite common for Athenian wives to manage the household budget. Lysistrata mentions the fact in her argument with the Probulus: LYS. ...for they are absolutely not going to take down this money! PROB. But what are you going to do? LYS. Is that your question? We’re going to manage it (tamieusomen auto). PROB. You are going to manage the money? LYS. And why do you find that so awful? Don’t we have complete management of your household money, too? PROB. But it’s not the same. LYS. How isn’t it the same? PROB. With this money the war must be fought. LYS. But the war must not be fought in the first place!”° Plato describes the Athenian custom as ‘piling up whatever one gathers into some one house, (where) we give all the money over to the women to manage’.”°

In some families, on the other hand, the pantry seems to have been kept locked, as another Aristophanic woman complains: ‘the things we used to be able to manage ourselves, and to sneak a little bit without getting caught — cereal, oil, wine — that isn’t possible any more either. Now the men have keys that they carry around themselves, secret, nasty Spartan doodads, with three teeth.’ ”’ Also instructive is a passage from the Samia in which we see the woman (in this case a mistress rather than a wife) in charge of the pantry — but it is the man’s slave who is telling her what to do with it: ‘Chrysis, give the cook whatever he asks for, and see to it that the old lady doesn’t get at the jugs, for the gods’ sake’.”®

Xenophon in the Oeconomicus recommended turning all the affairs of the house over to the wife, but he made no pretence of describing the normal situation. Presumably the monetary activity of the wife varied greatly from family to family. At one extreme were the husbands who put ‘Laconian locks’ on their pantries (if there were such; even Xenophon’s foil, Critobulus, seems to have been more trusting — ‘Is there anyone else to whom you turn over more affairs of importance than to your wife?’ asks Socrates, and Critobulus answers, ‘Nobody’),” and at the other — among families that had a kyrios — houses like that of Archippe, or of Xenophon’s hero Ischomachus, who could say that he hardly spent his time at home, since he trusted his wife to run the house.'™ Beyond this were families whose master was away, or had recently died. Here the woman might be left in virtual charge of all the family’s affairs, as Polyeuctus’ wife seems to have been after his death. She made loans to both her daughters, and one of the daughters paid the funeral expenses. In this family women seem regularly to have dealt with the family’s money: we see Spudias’ wife being sent to represent Spudias at the making of Polyeuctus’ will, and Polyeuctus’ daughters identifying the seals on his wife’s papers. '°' In a situation similar to that of Polyeuctus’ widow was the Troezenian mother of the sixth century or

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 16 earlier who set up her son’s funeral monument, ‘since there were no children in the house’ '°* to attend to it. Apollodorus complains of the bad state his affairs were in when he served as trierarch, and his wife

and mother had to manage at home.’ These are the sorts of families of whom Aeschines speaks, ‘whose fathers had died, and the mothers

managed their property’.'” The law, however, did not presume that a woman was likely to own money. Liturgies, whatever they may have been in a woman’s case, '”° were distributed on the basis of the family’s, that is, the husband’s, wealth, and paid for by him. Laws dealing with women’s crimes were not enforced by fines: an adulteress, for example, was forbidden to wear jewelry or to attend public rites, but she was not fined. If she disobeyed the law, she could have her clothing torn, her jewelry stripped off, and herself whipped, but still she was not fined.'°° The male citizen who married a foreign woman was fined a thousand drachmas; the female citizen who married a foreign man was not fined at all.’°” The property from which an Athenian woman lived, and which she might even manage, belonged not to her but to her family. It was only

her person, and her personal effects, that the law could attack.’

2

Acquisition We have seen in the previous chapter that the Athenian legal structure, with its refusal to see a woman as Kyria of property, was not the only factor determining the actual use that Athenian women made of their possessions. There were exceptions to the legal rule, exceptions that became more significant as we came to deal with less permanent property. For all that, the law was not a fiction. Not only did it determine much of the economic procedure — the exceptions, after all, could occur only as long as the kyrios permitted them — but it reflected reality more or less faithfully. If the law could afford to treat Athenian women as having no property, it was because they had, in fact, no real way of acquiring it. When women take an important role in the acquisition of property, pressure is generated for them to have more direct ability to dispose of it, as the experience of Western societies will attest; in Athens they had no such role. But in this and in subsequent chapters, as we examine the various dealings that women had with property, we shall see that in Athens, at least, direct ownership — more correctly, the lack of direct ownership — was only part of the story of women’s property. Now, it is not entirely true that one must acquire property before one can exchange or dispose of it. Leaving aside the activities of the speculator and the swindler, we will still find areas where property is less than personal, and what is acquired by one may be disposed of by another. This is true, to a greater or a lesser extent, of every family’s possessions, and it is difficult to trace every transaction between husband and wife, or to evaluate the economic meaning of such transactions. A man brings home money; his wife buys food; his cook prepares the food; all three eat the food, along with children and perhaps others who have had no part at all in any of the business. We will make our task much simpler if we say: the family acquired money, bought food, and consumed it. When dealing with a family that has been dead for more than two millennia, we will be very lucky to be able to say that much. In studying women, it will be well to bear this in mind. If the entire family has no means of acquiring property, it is in danger of starvation; if the woman has no means of acquiring property, she is dependent upon her husband. She may still be comfortable, even pampered. Thus when we examine the ability of women to acquire property on their

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 18 Own, we are examining not their capacity to survive, but their capacity to survive independently. Independence, however, was not the normal condition of Greek women, and in most women’s life the dowry, which we shall discuss later, was a more important matter than any that will be treated in this chapter. We are considering, for the moment, only means of original acquisition, that is, means of acquiring property without giving something else in return. Forms of exchange will be dealt with in chapter 5. Production and services. The productive activity of a family’s women may be designed either for internal or for external consumption. In the first case — that of a woman who makes her family’s clothes, for example — it decreases the amount of capital required, since the family need buy only raw materials; in the second — that of a professional seamstress — it increases the amount of capital available to the family. These two modes of production are obviously similar in their effects, but they are not identical. The second method is today the more profitable, for a woman can produce much more than her family needs, and so earn more money than she could have saved by staying at home. This is particularly true after the industrial revolution made hand-sewn, let alone hand-woven, clothing an expensive luxury; but it was clearly the case in Greece as well, for the sale of a woman’s produce (or of her labour) was the refuge of women in need of money. Euxitheus argues that his mother’s employment as a wet nurse, though a sign of poverty, does not impugn her citizenship: ‘for, as ’ve heard, many citizen women became wet nurses, weavers, and harvest-hands because of the hard times that the city was then going through — and many women who were poor then are rich now’.' A poor Aristophanic widow depends ~ upon her income from plaiting myrtle-wreaths: ‘For my husband died on me in Cyprus leaving me five little children, whom I barely managed to feed by plaiting wreaths in the myrtle-market. Now at first I managed to feed them half-badly ...’? and the poverty of Micyllus, in a fragment of Crates of Thebes, is emphasized by the fact that his wife helps him in his work: ‘and I watched Micyllus combing wool, and his wife combing with him, trying to escape starvation in baleful respectability’. °

The wealthier women did nothing of the sort. Ischomachus urged his wife to be energetic and manage her servants, rather than sit idle all day: ‘It seemed to me,’ he says, ‘that this would give her both something to do and a chance to walk around. I said that mixing and kneading dough was also good exercise, and shaking out and arranging the clothes and the bedding. I said that if she got this kind of exercise she would improve both her health and her appetite, and improve her complexion in reality’ * (i.e., as opposed to using make-up). Even for its cosmetic

Acquisition 19

value — and even to Ischomachus, whom Xenophon presents as a model of good management for the responsibility he grants his wife — a wealthy woman’s work was neither difficult nor profitable. Only economic necessity ever made a woman do work for external consumption.° A good example of such necessity is given by a chapter of Xenophon’s Memorabilia.® During the rule of the Thirty Tyrants, Aristarchus’ house has become a refuge for his sisters, nieces, and cousins — he now has fourteen free people living with him — and his income from his real estate has been cut off. ‘Now, Socrates,’ he complains, ‘it is hard to ignore one’s relatives as they are ruined, but it’s impossible to feed so many people in times like these.’ Still, he has not considered putting the women to work, and Socrates has to persuade him that to do so would be proper for free women. It was not the work that was shameful, but the compulsion. Aristarchus’ relatives all knew how to prepare food and clothing, and we

must presume that they had actually done so on occasion.’ Ischomachus’ wife knew how to weave.® Perhaps they might occasionally have made something for sale. Other women did; the woman who complains of Euripides that he has taught the men all the women’s tricks, ‘so that if some woman should ever plait a garland, her husband thinks she has a lover’? obviously has in mind neither a professional garland-plaiter like the widow mentioned above nor a housewife making a garland for her husband. Such also must be the woman of the Frogs who is working on a single garment, which she plans to sell herself.'° We do not know how high up on the social ladder such activity might extend; it is possible that even a rich woman might sell her products, or have them sold. But she would not work full-time in the hope of earning her keep; such labour was worthy only of a slave. "? Among those women who did work professionally, it would seem that the vast majority were talasiourgoi, workers in wool. Every housewife was at least an amateur talasiourgos, though I doubt whether she would have called herself that; the produce of her industry is referred to in Gortynian law as oti k’enupanei, ‘whatever she has woven within’.”” In the Odyssey Penelope, of course, spends her time at the loom; Calypso is first seen weaving, as is Circe, and we remember the tribute to the Phaeacians: ‘The Phaeacians were as far the most skilful of men in sailing a swift ship in the sea, as women are (the most skilful) craftsmen of the loom’.'? Of forty-two freedwomen whose trades are known to us from the Athenian manumission-inscriptions, thirty-one were talasiourgoi; the remainder are distributed among eight other occupations.'* The meaning of this concentration can be appreciated if we look at the sixty-one men in the same inscriptions: six farm-hands, six retailers, five cobblers,

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 20 three cooks, and the remainder scattered through forty different categories, no more than two to a job. A male slave might be trained for any employment that would pay; the women were used overwhelmingly as weavers, and they continued as such when they were freed. What was true of freedwomen is likely to have been true of citizens and metics as well; these were even less likely to be trained as labourers, but they would know how to spin and weave. This would be their most likely occupation, unless they could earn a living by helping their husbands in a small business. We do, of course, find women in jobs other than spinning and weaving. The inscriptions list two seamstresses,'° two wet nurses'® and one dry nurse,!” three laundresses,'® and even a cobbler;’” from other sources we know that women performed many tasks in the preparation of food.*? A woman potter appears on a vase,”’ and an Athenian curse-tablet mentions a gilder who apparently decorated the helmets that her husband made.”* Midwifery was the particular province of free women,”* and small tradeswomen

| appear frequently.** In short: many women worked for a living, but they did so to escape poverty, not to become rich. They were chiefly, though not exclusively, occupied by what the Greeks considered ‘women’s work’. They were able to support themselves, and even their families; but while Cleon, and Pasio, and Callias, and other Athenians could become wealthy by their businesses, we know of no woman who ever did so.

Gifts. It is not likely that there was any legal force in the gifts given by a man to a woman in his household; as long as he remained Kyrios, he was Still ‘master’ of the property, and such things as he provided for his dependants — chiefly food and clothing — will have been considered a part of his responsibility for maintaining them, rather than free gifts.”° Gifts of large value, as of land or money, would have no purpose as long as the family remained together, and we have no examples of such

gifts. The gifts given upon changes in the household — marriage, death, and divorce — were formalized by custom and by law, but the precise form-

ulation differed from place to place. Thus the dowry was in some states a gift to the woman, in others to her husband; a woman’s inheritance came to her sometimes by right, sometimes only by special gift of the deceased, or not at all. Rather than separate out those localities where these matters took the form of gifts, I have treated each of them in its own place. Inhenttance by will. Greece in the classical period was first beginning to accept the principle of free testamentary disposition, a principle based

on the idea of personal, rather than family, rights to property. The law | |

Acquisition 21

of Gortyn permitted no changes in the succession except by adoption, and even the provision of free choice in adopting a son was probably an innovation.?’ In Athens, the power to bequeath freely was first instituted by Solon,”® but it was restricted to men without legitimate sons. [In Sparta, a man was entirely free to leave his property to whomever he wished.”” The trend was toward the Spartan, and away from the Gortynian, system. At the beginning of the fourth century a litigant could claim that ‘while the Greeks differ on many other (points of law), on this (the right to make a will in the absence of descendants) they all agree’.°° In the Hellenistic period, bequests became yet freer.’ In Athens, the restrictions were formidable. The law read, “Whoever had not been adopted under terms forbidding renunciation or judicial challenge when Solon became archon, shall be permitted to bequeath his own property as he pleases, if there are no legitimate male children, (and) if he does not act by reason of insanity or old age or drugs or illness, or under the influence of a woman, behaving senselessly because of one of the above, or being constrained by force or by imprisonment’. These provisions left sufficient room for virtually any will to be challenged (the Thirty Tyrants, according to Aristotle, eliminated some of the limiting clauses ‘so as not to leave an opening for troublemakers’ **), and in fact the courts tended to be hostile to litigants claiming rights under a will.** We must suppose that a will whose beneficiary was a woman would ipso facto be suspected of having been made ‘under the influence of a woman’; but in spite of that we do know of such wills being made. In two of the three known cases, the wills were made for specific dangers — a military campaign® and an embassy*° — from which the testators returned safely, so that the provisions were never fulfilled; in the third, the girl did in fact succeed to the estate — but the heir ab intestato, who was her natural father, controlled the estate for nine years during the girl’s minority, a circumstance which may have blunted his eagerness to contest the will.*’ All of these wills were in fact testamentary adoptions, whereby the entire estate was left to the woman; we have no example of an estate being left to a woman who was not adopted by the testator. The adoption of women is attested for cities other than Athens, but no details are known.°*® If it was uncommon to designate a woman as heir to one’s entire estate, it was not at all uncommon to write a will in which the women of one’s family were provided for. Apollodorus, in contesting Pasio’s will, claimed that such provisions could be made only in the absence of legitimate sons; *’ but we have other cases to deny his claim. The father of Demosthenes, with a legitimate son, left a will giving a dowry of eighty minae to his wife, one of two talents to his daughter, and the usufruct of seventy minae to one of the three guardians he appointed; in the suits Demosthenes later brought to recover the estate, he never

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 22 contested his father’s right to give away this money. Diodotus, going off to war, left a will with his brother Diogeiton, and commanded him ‘if anything should happen to him, to give his wife away with a talent’s dowry and to give (her) what was in the house (presumably her ‘clothing and jewelry’), and (to give) a talent (as dowry) with his daughter. He also left his wife twenty minae and thirty Cyzicene staters’.”! This will, too, seems to have gone unchallenged, although Diodotus had two legitimate sons.*? At Gortyn, where disposition by will was not authorized, a husband could nevertheless leave his wife up to a hundred sta-

ters without the consent of his heirs; it seems probable that the older |

law allowed even more generous settlements.** In view of these examples, Apollodorus’ argument — which, as Wyse points out, even he did not offer for twenty years after his father’s death** — has very properly been rejected by all scholars who have examined the question.* Even a man with sons, apparently, could bequeath sums of money to others (though a woman, of course, would not be ‘another’ unless, as in the cases just mentioned, she was being given in marriage to another family); *° what he could not do was appoint a principal heir other than his sons.*’ In Sparta, and presumably in other cities as well, he could do even this; and we do know of one will from Erythrae in which a man’s sons were replaced by his wife, who took responsibility for their welfare.*®

The ability to make a will that did not exclude sons is likely to have worked to the benefit of women — wives and daughters — who were excluded from intestate inheritance, but in whose security the dying man was very interested. This is the case in the wills mentioned above of Pasio, Diodotus, and Demosthenes’ father; it is the only case provided for in the Gortynian law. In Athens, the provision might take the form of a dowry given to a designated husband, or of a legacy bequeathed directly to the woman. Pasio’s will provided for both, that of Demosthenes’ father only for the first. The most interesting is that of Diodotus, which, rather than giving the dowries to a husband-elect, ordered his executor Diogeiton to do so; in this way, Diodotus was able to ensure the women’s future (assuming Diogeiton’s trustworthiness) in spite of the fact that he had not selected a husband for them. The items ‘in the house’, which were to be given directly to his wife, were the trousseau that would go along with her to her new husband; the twenty minae and thirty Cyzicene staters were, on the other hand, left directly to her in the will, without passing through Diogeiton’s hands and without being dependent upon her marriage.*? In the two sentences that describe this will, we find all the forms by which Athenian men provided for their wives and daughters after their death. Intestate succession. Where the father did not, or could not, make a

Acquisition 23

will, or when the will was voided by the courts, the estate fell under the rules of intestate succession. These rules varied in particulars from place to place, but their essential structure was the same throughout Greece. Inheritance rights were determined by family proximity,°° but a woman had no right of inheritance in the presence of an equally close male. Thus, for example, a daughter inherited only in the absence of sons; a sister, only in the absence of brothers; an aunt, only in the absence of uncles. Granted this restriction, however, the rights of women were not abridged, and we have no record of any place in Greece where the rights of an uncle, for example, had precedence over the rights of a sister. Thus in Athens, a man’s sons inherited; if there were no sons, his daughter became an epikleros, with the attendant rules — eventually her sons inherited; if there were no daughters, the paternal relatives: brothers (or their children), then sisters, then uncles, then aunts, then, perhaps, great-uncles and great-aunts.°' If there were no paternal relatives within this circle, maternal relatives came in the same order: brothers, sisters, etc. Failing these, the estate reverted to the nearest paternal relative — presumably according to the same rule.° ” In other places the rules were similar. In Gortyn, the deceased’s daughters did in fact get a share — though not an equal share — in the presence of sons; beyond that, the order (as far as the inscription states it) was the same, with daughters (as epikleroi)°* followed by brothers, then sisters.°* The fact that the sisters have no rights in presence of brothers shows us that the limited inheritance of daughters was a special provision in their favour, and does not reflect a general equality or near-equality of women in Gortynian inheritance. An inscription of Naupactus on the occasion of a land division prescribes the order: sons, then daughters, then brothers, and explicitly excludes the daughters where there are sons to inherit.°° In early fourth-century Aegina, a paternal sister could claim an estate where the deceased had not left children or brothers.°* A private document from Tegea®’ and Plato’s Laws*® point in the same direction, though in the latter the philosopher’s plan to have a male and female heir for each estate required certain changes in the accepted pattern. Two effects of this law must be noticed. Most obviously, although a woman was legally competent to inherit, she was not guaranteed a share. Every man was entitled to a share of his father’s estate; but only certain women — those without brothers — could ever expect to inherit anything at all. The dowry was in some respects a compensation for this: although it did not, as we shall see, belong to the woman in a legal sense, it was a share of the patrimony, which was set aside for her maintenance, and which every woman was likely to count on. In Gortyn, in fact, women did share in the inheritance: daughters received one-half of a son’s share of their father’s inheritance, with the excep-

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 24 tion of certain forms of property (town houses; the contents of houses in the country, and the cattle — i.e., the essentials of the estate), which were divided exclusively among the sons. This phenomenon, unparalleled elsewhere and anomalous even in Gortyn, where sisters had no analogous rights, will be discussed later. Another, perhaps less obvious point, is that since the woman’s legal right to inherit was nowhere abridged, it was perfectly possible, even at Athens, for a woman to become the heiress of a very sizable estate. This being so, the absence of women from Athenian land records might seem Surprising; but again, the reason is to be sought in the fact that they were not heads of households. When a woman inherited, even though all the records indicate that she inherited ‘in her own right’, her kyrios immediately became kKyrios of the inheritance as well. He could dispose of it, and she could not; he was responsible for managing it, and she was not. Attic law recognized no other form of ownership;°’ the inheritance law, in which women were clearly capable heirs, was not

stating who was to become kynos of the property, but rather, into whose oikos it was to pass. It went without saying that the kynios of that oikos became kyrios of the inheritance; and so whether a man or a woman inherited, it was always a man who became the legal owner.

3

The Eptkleros Women, then, could inherit in certain circumstances; but they did not become the legal — or the effective — owners of their property. Particularly thorny was the matter of the epikleros, the daughter left without brothers at her father’s death. It would have seemed, on general principles, that she should have been the heiress of the estate; there is no hint in the law of any Greek city that would place a more distantly related male before her or any other female. Nobody should have come before a daughter except her brothers, and the epikleros, by definition, had none. But the matter was not as simple as that. In Athens, it was the epiKleros herself who passed, along with the inheritance, to her father’s next-of-kin. This latter — the anchisteus, to use the Attic term — claimed her along with her estate in the court of the archon; if he was successful in his claim, the girl was betrothed to him, and the estate passed to the children born of this union when they came of age. The law was not peculiar to Athens; it recurred, in various forms, in other cities, and may well have been true throughout Greece.’ It put the epikleros in a unique position both legally and socially, a position at once more powerful and more helpless than that in which her dowered neighbours found themselves. Definition. The ‘normal’ case of an epikleros was the one we have mentioned, a daughter without brothers at her father’s death. But in fact the word was used with various meanings, of which the reader should be aware at the outset. The different definitions are given concisely in the Suda under the word epikleros: ‘When a girl is orphaned of father and mother and lacking brothers, and when she has property pertaining to her, they call her an epikleros, similarly also a woman already married, when she is left along with the entire property, for they call pro-

perty a kleros. A woman is also called an epikleros who is not yet mar- : ried, but living with her father, inasmuch as all the property falls to her. And they are called epikleroi even if there are two or even more.’ The first sentence of this entry corresponds approximately to the case we mentioned above, except for the words ‘and mother’, which are incorrect; whether or not the girl’s mother was alive had no effect on the inheritance of her father’s estate.* We may also note that the ‘property pertaining to her’ might consist of an estate encumbered with debt.°

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 26 The extension of the definition to married women and to women who have sisters is supported by our sources;* the application of the term to ‘potential’ epikleroi whose fathers are still alive or not, but is likely enough.® The word seems also to have been used, on occasion, as if it were the feminine of orphanos, ‘orphan’.® These last two uses have no legal significance. The statement of the scholiast on Aeschin. 1.95 (A woman is called an epikleros, if her father on his deathbed leaves her to someone in marriage, saying that “I wish to give her to this man”’ ’) is not borne out by any of the extant literature, and may be a misunderstanding of a passage in Aristophanes.’ A certain amount of legal uncertainty seems to heve existed — or to have been created — as to the precise definition of the term epikleros. None of the laws that have been preserved define the term, and some of the claims of speakers seem to have been legally disputable. Apollodorus, attempting to demonstrate that his mother was an epikleros, quoted a law on betrothal, which — he claimed — defined an epikleros as any woman without father, brother from the same father, or paternal grandfather; the effort he makes to demonstrate his mother’s status shows that his opponent denied it, and his opponent was certainly correct. The claim of the speaker of Isaeus 10 rests on the presumption that his mother became an epikleros when her minor brother died after his father; this claim is uncertain to us, and may have been denied by the archon.’ The basic meaning of the word, however, is clear, and most women must have known whether or not they were epikleroi. Ownership of the estate. The only legal restraints on the husband’s kyrieia of his wife’s property were those connected with her dowry, and her only protection against having her money spent by a profligate husband came from her male relatives. This was hardly direct control of her property, but it could, as we shall see when we come to discuss the dowry, be used to good advantage. The epikleros had no such leverage; she could not take her fortune and return to her former Kyrios, for it was to him that she was married. The protection of her estate was therefore managed by removing it as soon as possible from the anchisteus and placing it in the hands of its heirs, who thereupon became responsible for their mother’s maintenance, just as they would have been if they were in possession of her dowry. This law has been preserved for us: ‘And if a person be born of an epikleros, as soon as he is two years past puberty, he is to have control of the possessions, and give an allowance of food to his mother’.’° The law does not seem to distinguish the case of an epikleros married to the anchisteus from that of an epikleros married to an outsider; we do not know if any such distinction existed in practice.'! No law that has come down to us specifies who was to own the es-

The Epikleros 27 tate of the epikleros until her children came of age, and it is certain that no such law existed; for whenever the orators refer to the interim state of the inheritance, it is always the law we have just quoted to which appeal is made. The text of the law, of course, says nothing about this problem; but its intention was clear enough to the Athenians, who recognized it as denying to the husband of the epikleros the kyneia (and here we must translate ‘right of ownership’) that a husband normally exercised over his wife’s goods. Thus the speaker of Isaeus 10 remarks, ‘Nor, gentlemen, was it permissible for either Aristomenes or Apollodorus, who had the right to claim my mother’s hand by epidiKasia, (to have had her estate without marrying her). For it would be extraordinary to believe that, whereas if Apollodorus or Aristomenes had married my mother, he would not have been able to become kyrios of her possessions — according to the law which permits no one to become kyrios of the possessions of an epikleros except the children, who have control of the possessions when they are two years past puberty — but now that he has given her in marriage to another, it would be possible for him to have a son adopted as heir to her possessions!’'* Similarly Ciron’s grandson: ‘For if my mother, Ciron’s daughter, were alive, and Ciron had died without making a will, and my opponent were his brother, instead of being (merely) his nephew, he would be entitled to marry the woman, but not entitled to her property; (her property would rather belong to) the children born from him and from her, when they were two years past puberty; for that is what the laws command’. In other passages it is stated directly that the estate belonged, during the minority of the children, to the epikleros herself: ‘For we believe that the nearest of kin should marry her, but the possessions should belong at first to the epikleros, and then, when the children are two years past puberty, they should control them’.'* Similar in intent is the expression ‘what had been left to my mother’ in a fragment of Hypereides dealing with the succession of an epikleros’ son.** We might accept these last citations and state that the epikleros herself controlled the estate during her sons’ minority; but this control must have been very passive, since her right to dispose of it legally was limited to transactions of the value of a medimnus of barley. Nevertheless, the estate had to be managed by someone; if it included land, the land had to be worked, and if it included a tenement, the rents had to be collected. Now the epikleros’ husband was surely Kyrios of her person, and presumably, as every other husband at Athens, he managed his wife’s estate. If there were expenses involved in its management, he must have been able to pay them out of the capital. But he was responsible to the heirs when they came of age, and if he had mishandled the property he could be called to account. The difference between the estate of an epikleros and the dowry of an ordinary wife was not that

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 28 the epikleros could exercise more legal control over her property, but that her husband could exercise less; and for this reason the sources never refer to her estate as if it belonged to him.’® His position was analogous to that of an epitropos, the guardian of an orphan — so much so, in fact, that the estate was exempted from liturgies, as were those of orphans, during the children’s minority.’” It appears to have been possible, though not required,'® for the husband of the epikleros to have one of her sons adopted posthumously as a son of her father. Normally adoption conferred rights of inheritance; this was true of posthumous adoption as well.'? Where there was an epikleros, however, the adoption had to be ‘with’ her, that is, the adopted son had to marry the girl.*° Clearly this was out of the question when it was her own son who was being adopted; and the question has been raised, whether the adopted son now enjoyed exclusive rights to his grandfather’s property. On the one hand, as Hruza pointed out,”’ he lost his rights to his father’s estate by being adopted; on the other, we know of at least one case where the adopted son already had a brother who had achieved his majority, and it seems unlikely that this elder brother could have been required to relinquish the estate of which he was already Kyrios.** Much has been said on both sides,”’ none of it entirely convincing. Where adoption did not take place, the oikos of the deceased became extinct, for its heirs — the children of the epikleros — belonged to their father’s oikos, not their maternal grandfather’s. The point is of some significance, for it shows that whatever the function of the epiclerate may have been at Athens, it was not a method of preserving the oikoi. Marnage to an outsider. Not every epikleros was conveniently unmarried at her father’s death. Even a father with no sons, when his daughter came of age, was obliged to arrange a marriage for her; and he did not necessarily marry her to his next-of-kin. There were certainly some cases, however, in which such a marriage could be dissolved by the anchisteus upon the father’s death. ‘Many men who were already married have had their own wives taken away from them’”* says one litigant, and it is not the sort of statement that could be made if it were false. Another litigant alleges that his father had to give up his claim to his mother’s estate because of threats from the anchisteus to take away the mother by epidikasia.**> The prevalent view among modern scholars is that the marriage could be dissolved only so long as it had not produced a male heir; various attempts have been made to prove this, but none have been completely successful.”° The best piece of evidence comes from the Adelphoe of Terence, where Micio teases his adopted son Aeschinus by pretending to represent the anchisteus of the girl Aeschinus has seduced and would like to marry.

The Epikleros 29 MI. This girl is orphaned of her father; this friend of mine is her next-of-kin: the laws require her to marry him. AE. I’m done for. MI. What’s wrong? AE. Nothing; it’s all right; go on. MI. He’s coming to take her away with him, since he lives in Miletus. AE. Oh no! To take the girl away with him? MI. That’s right. AE. Excuse me — all the way to Miletus? MI. Yes. AE. I don’t feel well. What about them? What do they say? MI. What would you expect of them? But it doesn’t matter. The mother made up a story that a child had been born by some other man — and she doesn’t name him; she says that he comes first, and the girl shouldn’t be given to my friend.”” The “some other man’ is, of course, Aeschinus; but what is significant for us is that the law must be Athenian — it is hardly Roman — and the mother can challenge the right of the anchisteus by claiming that the girl has had a son. Micio later objects by questioning the legitimacy of the marriage (‘who betrothed her? who gave her away? whom did she marry, and when?’), not by denying that the law is as the mother implied.2® Terence, a Roman playwright who adapted Athenian comedies, is not the best authority we have for Attic law; but in this case there is little reason to doubt his word. In fact, where a son had been born, the adjudication of the epikleros would serve little purpose, for the deceased would already have his grandchild, and we have no reason to believe that a potential son by the anchisteus was any more desirable:*? before the son was born, on the other hand, the anchis teus would probably have been able to dissolve the marriage by his authority as kyrios (for Greek marriage was in certain respects a conditional agreement, dependent upon the birth of children) — whereupon the girl would be liable to epidikasia, and he could claim her.*° The original marriage, then, would apparently subsist if it had produced a male heir; * it could also remain if there were no anchisteus, or if the relatives chose not to challenge the marriage. Such seems to have been the case with the daughters of Polyeuctus, whose marriages remained after his death although there is no indication that their husbands were his next-of-kin; ** Meidylides attempted to marry his daughter to the anchisteus during his lifetime, and married her to a third party only when his brother ‘said that he preferred not to marry, and rather allowed the estate to remain undivided because of this, living on his own in Salamis’. *° The father might also ensure the future of the marriage by adopting his son-in-law; this possibility will be considered later. Lastly, the anchisteus himself might give away the epikleros to another man, preferring either to keep his own wife, or to remain unmarried, or to avoid saddling himself with a debt-ridden estate — or even, perhaps, to find a more suitable husband for the girl.** The estate of an epikleros always passed to her children, whether by the anchisteus or by an outsider. It could enter the kyrieia of the

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 30 anchisteus only if he married the girl; this is the meaning of the law of succession which begins, ‘whoever dies without having made a will, if he leaves female children, with these; if not, the following are to be kynot of the property’. (There follows a list of possible heirs, beginning from the paternal brothers of the deceased.) > The words ‘with these’ — syn tautéisin — here mean, as they do in the law of adoption,”® ‘on condition of marrying them’; if the girl was given instead to an outsider, her husband assumed the management of her estate, and his children became kyrioi of it upon their majority, or perhaps on their mother’s death.*’ The real and hypothetical applications of this rule are numerous.°° If the estate was worth anything at all, it was obviously to the financial advantage of the anchisteus to marry the girl and obtain her father’s entire patrimony, rather than the smaller portion he could get by marrying a dowered woman of the same wealth. Occasionally the girl’s husband, or another interested party, would make an arrangement to buy off the next-of-kin. The speaker of Isaeus 10 claims that his father allowed the next-of-kin unchallenged rights to the estate throughout his lifetime, for fear that his wife would be taken away from him.°? Chaerestratus offers a similar bargain to Smicrines in Menander’s Aspis, so take the entire estate, however much it is, become the kKyrios, we

give it to you; but let the girl get a husband appropriate to her age. I will give along with her two talents’ dowry out of my own pocket, but Smicrines refuses with foresight: By the gods, do you suppose that you’re talking to Simple Simon? What are you saying? I should take the estate, but let the girl go to this other man so that, if a son should be born, he could sue me for having possession of his property? *° He is worried, of course, about exactly the kind of suit that the speaker of Isaeus 10 claimed to bring. It is possible that a similar agreement ex_ Isted between Xenocles and Endius, whereby the former agreed not to contest the estate until the latter’s death; the speech we have, delivered by Endius’ brother and heir, makes much of Xenocles’ delay, and takes it to imply that he knew his wife was not a true epikleros.*' An interesting bargain was struck, according to Andocides,* between Callias and Leagrus in the matter of an epikleros who had been adjudged to the latter. Leagrus, in return for a sum of money, gave up his claim on the woman; this would then permit Callias’ son to claim her — if Andocides, who was a nearer relation, could be kept away. Andocides advances this as Callias’ reason for allegedly framing him on the charge of profaning the mysteries. However that may be, it is interesting to see that the anchisteus could, in this case, be bought off for a fixed amount — presumably less

The Epikleros 31 than the value of the estate. The explanation lies in the nature of the estate: it consisted, according to Andocides, of two talents of assetson-hand and more than five talents of debt. Andocides tries to paint this as a poor estate (‘the household’s affairs were doing badly’, he says), but the battle over it is an indication that considerable wealth was involved; presumably as much was owed to the estate as by it, and possibly much more. Callias, a man of fantastic wealth who was in the process of losing it,’* was casting about for a way to regain his fortune; he was willing to gamble on his ability to collect the outstanding wealth of the estate. Leagrus, for his part, was willing to accept a bird in the hand; but the attempt apparently failed, for Callias’ son married another woman, the daughter of Alcibiades.“ Adopted sons. The law of Solon permitted a man with no sons to adopt one. The adopted son thereupon became his heir, and was known by the patronymic of his adoptive father; on the other hand, he lost his claim to the inheritance of his natural father. If his adoptive father had a daughter, the son was required to marry her.*° In effect, then, a father could prevent his daughter from becoming adjudicable upon his death by adopting his son-in-law. This method, however, was not always the best. The son-in-law might refuse, since the adoption would exclude him from his own patrimony; and a man with two daughters might not want to settle his estate on only one of them.*° Instructive is the case of Polyeuctus, who gave away his elder daughter with a dowry of forty minae, and married the younger to her maternal uncle, whom he adopted. He quarrelled with the uncle, dissolved the marriage, and married the younger daughter to Spudias, giving her a dowry of (apparently) thirty minae; arbitration was required between Polyeuctus and his daughter’s ex-husband to resolve the economic problems arising from the divorce. In the eventual settlement, the adoption was cancelled,*’ and Polyeuctus’ estate was divided between his daughters at his death. His sons-in-law, in their turn, quarrelled over the division of the estate: the dowry of forty minae promised to the first included ten minae to be delivered by the adopted son at Polyeuctus’ death. Since, at Polyeuctus’ death, the adoption had been invalidated, the son-in-law tried to remove the ten minae from the estate, but was resisted by Spudias; our speech is from the court case that resulted.*® It is quite possible that Spudias claimed that the ten minae were to be the speaker’s share in the inheritance, which meant he had nomore right to the extra compensation. In any event, it is clear that Polyeuctus created a good deal of trouble for himself by adopting his daughter’s first husband, and that he did not improve the situation by failing to adopt her second.

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 32 The epikleros and the oikos. On the face of it the mandated marriage of an orphan daughter with a near relative looks like a device to preserve the deceased’s oikos; and indeed, it has been claimed*’ that this was a major purpose of the law, or even the major purpose. This may have been the case elsewhere in Greece, where the details of the law differed from the Athenian; but it cannot have been its function at Athens. Now, there is no doubt that the preservation of the oikoi was an important goal of Athenian law;°° and in fact, the law offered a means for that, by the adoption of a son. If there was a daughter, the adopted son had to marry her; if there was not, he became the sole heir. Either way, he or his children remained in the household and continued its existence after the death of the adopter. This was, in fact, the entire purpose of adoption in Athens; it was not designed to provide parents for orphans or to provide children for childless couples, but to perpetuate the oikos. Thus the adoptee was usually a relative of the adopter, often an adult;*' and adoption could take place even after the death of the adopter, in which case his heirs would arrange the adoption, but the adopted would still be considered the son of the deceased.” The law of the epikleros, however, saved no oikos from extinction. For there were in fact two oikoi involved: the immediate oikos of the deceased — that is, his descendants — and that of his parents or grandparents, of which his collaterals were a part. The latter (as long as there was a male next-of-kin to claim the epikleros) was in no more danger of dying out than any other oikos with surviving males. It might be argued, perhaps, that this larger oikos had an interest in seeing that no share of the grandfather’s inheritance passed to another family; but had this been the intent of the law, it would have had to apply to all women who inherit — which seems not to be the case, although it cannot be proven — and maternal relatives would have had to be eliminated from the succession, which, in Athens, was explicitly not the case. The smaller oikos, on the other hand — that of the deceased — had only daughters; what we should require would not be that their children be gotten by members of the larger oikos (which does not lack for heirs), but rather that these children, by whatever father, remain in the smaller oikos. We need, in short, a system whereby the deceased would be considered father to his daughter’s children, or to some of them; that is, a system of automatic adoption. We have not a shred of evidence for such a system in Athens, or in Gortyn, or anywhere in Greece. In Athens, indeed, we know the contrary to have been true, for the younger Eubulides, whose mother was an epikleros, was a member of his father’s oikos until given in posthumous adoption into his grandfather’s.°> There was nothing automatic about his entry into his grandfather’s household; this entry was accomplished by the appro-

The Epikleros 33 priate vehicle, adoption, and the epiclerate had nothing to do with it. The adoption was neither compulsory when the law of the epikleros applied®** nor precluded when it did not.°> The oikos which survived was the one whose kAyvios saw to it that a son was born or adopted, and if nobody took care of this, the presence of an epikleros would not Save it.

Rich epikleroi. A rich epikleros was a prize, and suitors flocked around her. Protomachus divorced his wife in order to marry one,°° and Timocrates seems to have done the same.°’ Androcles was so eager to gain Euctemon’s estate that he claimed the hand of his daughter as an epiKleros at the same time as he advanced two boys as being legitimate sons of Euctemon.°® Andocides accused Callias of plotting ‘to have me killed without trial or exiled, bribe Leagrus, and marry Epilycus’ daughter’.°’ Aristotle, describing how civil wars arise ‘not over small issues, but out of small incidents’ (ou peri mikron all’ ek mikron).© mentions even bloodier competitions: ‘and in the case of Mytilene, it was the beginning of many troubles when a conflict arose concerning epikleroi, culminating in the war against Athens in which Paches captured their city. For when Timophanes, one of the rich men (of Mytilene), left two daughters, Dexandrus — who had been forced out of the picture and failed to get either of them for his sons — began the civil disturbance and egged on the Athenians, whose proxenos he was. And in Phocis, too, when there was a conflict about an epikleros concerning Mnaseas the father of Mnason and Euthycrates the father of Onomarchos, that conflict was the beginning of the Sacred War against Phocis.’ ©! Neither of these stories is attested elsewhere, and they may be apocryphal; but they do indicate how serious could be the competition for a rich woman’s hand.

Epidikasia. It was the duty of the archon to decide such disputes, as it was his duty to decide inheritance cases in general; the polemarch had jurisdiction over metic epikleroi.°* The anchisteus had no right to marry the girl until the archon adjudged her to him.®? Any claimant to the rights of next-of-kin had to put in a claim with the archon; the claim was publicized, and other claimants invited to apply.“ The woman was awarded to the nearest relative who appeared; the order was apparently the same as that in the normal inheritance law, which appears to have

specified (a) paternal brothers of the deceased, or their legitimate , children; (b) paternal sisters, or their legitimate children; (c) paternal uncles, or their legitimate children; (d) paternal aunts, or their legitimate children — in these last two categories the limit ‘as far as cousins’ children’ (mechri anepsi6n paidGn) may mean that representation did not pass on indefinitely;® (e) maternal relatives, in the same order as

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 34 the above, also ‘as far as cousins’ children’; (f) more distant paternal relatives ad infinitum.™ In the adjudication of an epikleros, of course, only males could be considered; but it seems clear that in Athens, unlike Gortyn, the claim to an epikleros could be inherited through

ant.females, °” so that a sister’s son, for example, would be an eligible claimAthenian inheritance law did not recognize primogeniture, but prescribed equal division per stirpes®®> among members of each of the

groups mentioned above. Since the Athenians were monandrous, this was impossible in the case of the epikleros, and the girl, with such rights to her fortune as her husband had, belonged to the oldest member of the nearest class of relations.°’ Since the archon was called upon to judge only among those candidates who presented themselves, there was always the possibility that a nearer one existed. The announcement of the herald, inviting any claimant to apply was an effort to make sure that all possible claimants appeared; epheboi — young men undergoing military training, who normally could neither sue nor be sued — were granted special leave to appear in court to claim their inheritance or their rights to an epikleros.’° If in spite of this a nearer relative appeared later, he could challenge the adjudication and have it revoked in his favour;’* but his opponent might argue that his delay in claiming demonstrated the weakness of his case.’” Except for the rule of primogeniture, the entire procedure of epidikasia was the same for any estate, whether or not it included an epikleros. This is not quite to say that the epikleros was ‘merely a piece of property’, but rather that the right to the epikleros and the right to the estate were, in Athenian law, functions of the same thing: proximity of relation to the deceased. The purpose of the epidikasia was to establish who the nearest relative was; he then became kyrios of the deceased’s Oikos, a position which made him both owner of the property and kyrios of the women. If the women were not epikleroi — if, for example, a man inherited his brother’s estate, and became thereby Ayrios of his unmarried sister — then the heir’s responsibility was the same as that of any Kyrios: to find her a husband, if she was of marriageable age, and provide a suitable dowry. But if there was an epikleros in the oikos under adjudication, the law was just the opposite: her new kyrios was not to marry her off to another, but to take her for his own wife. The law, in fact, equated the adjudication of an epikleros with the betrothal (engyé) ’° of other women: ‘Any woman whom a father or paternal brother or grandfather on the father’s side betroths lawfully to be a wife — children born from her are to be legitimate. If there be none of the above, if she be an epikleros, the kyrios is to marry her, and if not, that person will be kyrios to whom he shall turn her over.’ ”* Now, it was

The Epikleros 35 the hallmark of a lawful marriage that children born from it were legitimate; thus the first phrase, legitimizing the children of a betrothed wife, legitimizes marriage by betrothal, and the second phrase, legitimizing the marriage of an epikleros with her kyrios, legitimizes the children of such a marriage. No further betrothal was necessary.” The kyrios of another woman could give her in marriage but not marry her; conversely, the epikleros’ next-of-kin could marry her himself, but not — as long as there were other claimants — give her in marriage. This is hinted at by Aristotle, who complains that in Sparta ‘whoever is left as heir gives her (the epikleros) to whomever he wishes’’® — acomplaint which implies that such was not the case at Athens, since Aristotle is describing the causes of Spartan weakness in his day. But a clearer indication is given by the case already mentioned of Andocides and Leagrus, in which Callias, having bought off Leagrus (the nearest relative) then had to dispose of Andocides in order to get the girl for his son.’’ Had it been legal, it would surely have been much simpler to have had Leagrus agree to claim the girl, and then give her in marriage to Callias’ son; but Leagrus apparently had no such option. He could fail to put in a claim for the epikleros, in which case Andocides would succeed in his claim; or he could claim her, in which case he would go out of court with the girl already legally betrothed to him. Only in the case of a poor eptkleros, whom nobody was willing to claim, did the law provide for the next-of-kin to offer her in marriage to another. Since the benevolence of the Athenian people was a myth dear to their own hearts, judges might perhaps have listened to the argument of a claimant like Chaerestratus, who wished the court to declare his aunt an epikleros for — he assured them — her own good: ‘Now, you must consider this ... whether Philoctemon’s sister, who was married to Chaereas and is now widowed, ought to be turned over to these men (sc. her alleged brothers, whose legitimacy Chaerestratus is contesting) to be given in marriage to whomever they please or left to grow old unmarried, or whether, being legitimate, she ought to be adjudicated in marriage to whomever seems best to you.’ Chaerestratus, of course, is her next-of-kin. Aristophanes shows less innocence when Philocleon describes the procedure in the Wasps: “And if a father dies leaving his daughter to someone as an epikleros, we tell the will to go cry its head off along with the case so solemnly placed on its seals, and we give her to whomever persuades us with his pleading. And we can’t be held accountable, unlike all the other offices’.” The married epikleros. Where the estate was rich, the system of epidiKasia was hardly likely to produce a love-match. The most immediate problem caused by the rules themselves was the danger of a young

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 36 epikleros being claimed by a much older man. One law, reported by Plutarch, required that the husband of an epikleros sleep with her three times a month, and this will have eliminated some from the competition; another, ostensibly Solonian, mentioned in the same passage, permits the court to dissolve her marriage and choose a more reasonable mate, if the man to whom she has been adjudicated is unable to perform his marital functions.” But the young epikleros and her old husband were surely not unknown at Athens: Isaeus mentions a girl, still a minor at her father’s death, who was eventually married by her guardian,®’ and age is one of the considerations urged unsuccessfully on Smicrines in the Aspis to get him to withdraw his claim.®? Plato’s Laws provided for judgement by the magistrate as to the pair’s suitability, “examining the males when they are naked, and the females stripped to the navel’; *° the law of Gortyn included the most obvious safeguard, for there the woman could refuse the match.™ It is probable that popular scorn, along with the legal minimum of marital rights, discouraged many people from applying for epikleroi; but a middle-aged man was surely eligible to compete for a pubescent girl, and surely many did. As for control of her money, the position of the epikleros differed from that of the dowered bride only in degree. Like the dowered bride, she was not kyria of the money, which her husband could use as he pleased — but since her estate was larger and her husband had usually been attracted by it more than by her, she was rather more exposed to his abuse. On the other hand, again like the dowered bride, she derived leverage from the fact that the husband who abused her sufficiently was open to very uncomfortable legal action — but since the law provided sterner penalties for epiklérou kakdsis (abuse of an epikleros) than for wasting a dowry,” the epikleros had a stronger hand. We find at least one case of alleged exploitation: ‘as long as the estate of the epikleros whom Hegesandros — this man’s lover — had married and the money which he brought back from the expedition under Timomachus lasted, they led a wanton and profligate existence... ’,°° but the men seem to have been equally wary of the opposite problem: ‘Whoever sets his heart on marrying a rich epikleros is either paying the penalty of the gods’ anger, or else wants to be miserable and be called lucky’,°’ Or again:

A. I’ve married a witch of an epikleros; hadn’t I told you? B. Not about this. A. We’ve gotten ourselves an outright boss of the house and the fields and everything. B. Good God, how awful. A. As awful as can be. She’s a pain to everybody, not just to me, much more so to my son, my daughter. B. You’re describing a hopeless situation. A. Don’t I know it!88 Aristotle, after comparing the normal household of a man and wife to an ‘aristocracy’, finds the degenerate form in our case: “Sometimes the

The Epikleros 37 wives rule, being epikleroi; then the rule is not according to merit, but by wealth and power, just as in oligarchies’.©’ The position of the epikleros seems to have differed little in this respect from that of the modern rich heiress: exposed to fortune-hunting and avarice, she also had considerable power to wield over the man who won her. What she did not have was any part in choosing that man — nor even the paternal benevolence that served the other women of Athens at the time of decision. Poor epikleroi. Quite different was the state of the epikleros with a small inheritance. She had neither money to attract a mate, nor a father or brother who could try to collect a dowry. The situation was bad enough for the polis to have to force her relatives by law to marry her off. The law is preserved in a speech included in the Demosthenic corpus: Those epikleroi who are assessed in the thetic (i.e., poorest) class: if their nearest relative does not wish to marry them, he is to give them in marriage, along with a dowry of five hundred drachmas if he is a pentakosiomedimnos (the richest class), three hundred if he is a hippeus (the next class), a hundred fifty if he is a zeugités (the third class), in addition to her own property. And if there are more than one in the same proximity of relationship, each is to give propor tionately to the epikleros. If there are more than one woman, it is not compulsory for each one”’ to give more than one in marriage,

but each nearest relative in turn (ton engutata aei) shall either give : her in marriage or marry her himself. If the nearest relative does not marry them or give them in marriage, the archon is to compel him either to marry her himself or to give her in marriage. If the archon should not compel him, he is to owe a thousand drachmas, which are to be consecrated ... Anyone who wishes may denounce before the archon the man who does not fulfil this.”’ Along with the laws went a sense of obligation; the speaker of Isaeus 1 says to the jurors that if his cousin had been a poor epikleros, the laws ‘and my sense of shame before you’ would have forced him to marry her.?? Nor should we forget the noble speech of Andocides to Leagrus, insincere though it be: “This would be behaving like honourable men, to show our family ties to each other in such a circumstance. It is not right for us to choose other property or a man’s fortune, if that would mean disdaining Epilycus’ daughter. For if Epilycus were alive, or if he had died and left much property, we would have expected to marry his children, since we are the nearest relatives. Now, that would surely have been because of Epilycus or because of his property; but now it will be because of our honesty. So you claim the hand of one of them, and I the other.’ °° The fine sentiments are only slightly dimmed by the

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 38 likelihood that the girl was, in fact, rich. How often such noble feelings were aroused by a true pauper we do not know. In Athens the legally fixed dowry of five minae was apparently insufficient to attract a husband, and it had to be doubled.”* In Thurii, too, where the law had been the same as the Athenian, it was finally necessary, according to Diodorus, to change it: henceforward the anchis teus was required to marry the epikleros, with no alternative of giving her away.” As barbaric as the custom of assigning a husband by inheritance law may seem to the modern mind, the plight of the penniless epikleros was bad enough to make it an act of charity. After all, anything — to a Greek — was better than spinsterhood. Redress. The archon was the legal defender of citizen epikleroi, the polemarch of metics.”° It was his duty to punish all the abuses to which epikleroi were subject: kyrioi who refused to marry the women or to give then in marriage; husbands or guardians who wasted their estates; husbands who failed to perform their marital duties; outsiders who occupied their property illegally.”’ The law that has been preserved seems, in fact, to give the archon power over all possible abuses: ‘He is to take care of them, and he is not to permit anyone to do any injury towards them. And if anyone should commit any injury or do anything illegal, he is to have authority to impose a fine up to the limit of his powers’. He could also go to a heliastic court to demand a penalty larger than his own powers would allow.”® It was, furthermore, the prerogative of any citizen to denounce a man to the archon for abuse of an epikleros and to prosecute without having to pay court fees, or to pay the usual fine if he did not receive a fifth of the judges’ votes, or to have his eloquence trammelled by a limit on the length of his speech.” The laws gave the widest possible latitude to the prosecution, and we know of a case of a man being accused — and convicted, though our source complains that the trial was improper'” — of epiklérou Kakosis, wronging an epikleros, for abusive behaviour towards the daughters of a man from whom he was collecting a debt. The Athenian courts, then, were anything but insensitive to the exposed position of the epikleros. With their accustomed paternal attitude, they did all they could to protect her. To the modern mind it seems obvious that they could have solved her problems by granting her the right to dispose of her own hand; but to do so would have required allowing her to meet many suitors, to become acquainted with this one and with that, to go through various flirtations, and finally to settle on a husband of her choice. Such an idea was abhorrent to Athenian ideas of modesty and family; we, who have but a passing acquaintance with either, may perhaps hesitate before making the obvious judgment.

The Epikleros 39 The function of the epiclerate. The legal position of the epikleros may Strike the reader as bizarre, but that need not concern us at the descriptive level of history. Many facts about the Greeks seem bizarre, and surely many more would seem so if we understood them truly rather than fitting them willy-nilly into our twentieth-century expectations. What demands explanation, though, is the fact that her position was anomalous within Athenian law itself. If we look at the major principles governing her position, four stand out: (a) when a man dies and leaves daughters, his nearest collateral relative inherits the estate; (b) along with the estate, he inherits the daughters as well — or rather, each of the near collateral relatives inherits one daughter, and a corresponding proportion of the estate; (c) ‘inheriting’ the daughters is the legal equivalent of betrothal, and he must in fact consummate the marriage in order to retain possession of the estate; (d) when his sons by the daughter are two years past puberty, they take over the estate. But of these four principles, only one is consistent with normal Athenian practice. (a) is not, for, as we have already seen, men did not normally inherit in the presence of more closely-related women; although the women could not become kyriai of the property in their own right, it entered their household in preference to that of the more distant male, and their kyrios became kyrios of the money. (c) surely was not the case; a woman’s kyrios (other than the husband to whom she had been betrothed) generally had neither the obligation nor the right to marry her himself. (d) was just as exceptional; normally sons did not become kyrioi of any of their father’s property until he either died or resigned his property to them. Only the second principle is in line with common practice, for the heir to an estate did indeed, in general, become kyrios of any women who belonged to it; but even here matters did not work quite in the normal way, because in the usual case (where the kyrios did not have to marry the woman to get the estate) a single heir would become kyrios of as many women as there

were. |

The law of the epikleros, then, can only have been a law specially designed for her case, since it was not the outcome of the general princi-

ples at work in the rest of the law. What prompted the Greeks to make : such a rule? Or, if its origins are perhaps lost in an age of which we are too ignorant to make intelligent statements, why did they maintain it throughout the classical period? Let us consider, for a moment, what the situation of the epikleros would have been if there had been no special laws concerning her — if

the law had simply declared that daughters inherit in the absence of , sons, and brothers in the absence of daughters, without making any further provisions in the matter.

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 40 She would, indeed, have been ‘heiress’, in the sense that the property would enter her household; but since she was not kyria of that household, the ultimate Kyrios of the property would have been whoever was her own kyrios. If she was married, this would be her husband; if she was not, it would be her nearest relative — that is to say, the anchisteus. Now in fact only the latter case need be considered, since if she was married and had children, she did not, apparently, become an epikleros at all; but as long as she had no children, the marriage was considered incomplete, and her father, at least, had the right to dissolve it. If, as seems reasonable, this right devolved upon the next-of-kin with her father’s death, he would have been in a position to make himself kyrios of the epikleros by dissolving her marriage, even had there been no special legislation in her case. If the property fell to the woman, then, it was her next-of-kin who became its kyrios; that is to say, of the four principles stated at the outset, (a), while it seems contrary to the spirit of the inheritance law, follows necessarily from the structure of the Greek family, and would follow even if the law had made the epikleros heiress in her own right. So far, so good, then, and if it disturbs our imaginary heiress to see her uncle or cousin managing ‘her’ money, she is no worse off than every other woman of Athens, each of whom had her property managed by her Kyrios. This is all fine if she is eight years old. But what if she is fourteen, and ready to get married? When an orphan came of age he was entitled to his patrimony,'°' and a girl, whose marriage was the beginning of her majority, must have been entitled to the same; that is to say, her Kyrios — whose job it was to marry her off — would presumably have had to deliver to the groom the estate to which she was, under the ‘what-if? laws we are describing, heiress. But now the crunch comes: for the entire value of the estate stands as an inducement to her next-of-kin to put off the marriage. Next year will be plenty of time. Or maybe the year after that. Or the year after that. And so the girl will reach twenty-four, and thirty-four, and forty-four without getting married. A modern mind may find the poor girl’s situation touching, but it hardly seems to demand the drastic remedy that was applied. Surely she could go to court? It is highly unlikely that any court, at the period during which these laws grew up, would have interfered between a woman and her kyrios; even in classical Athens, it was still her Kyrios who represented her in court, and the law did not expect another man to be more zealous in protecting her rights than her kyrios. When he himself was the problem, the courts could offer little help. Could the woman elope? To concubinage, perhaps, but never to marriage. Marriage in Athens was a contract between families, not individuals. Until the head of her oikos gave her in marriage into another oikos, she was

The Epikleros 4] not married, and her children were not legitimate; and these were matters of which the Greeks kept very careful record. It would surely seem, to a modern mind, that an exception could have been made, either to allow the woman to contract her own marriage, or to appear in court to force her kyrios to give her away; but the entire conception of marriage, of the family, and of woman‘s place within the family militated

against this. |

It would appear, then, that it was the orphan daughter herself whose situation would have been most compromised had the laws of the epikleros not obtained. The laws cannot have been designed to protect the rights of the next-of-kin; he, as the girl’s Kyrios, had all the rights he needed. They did not protect the dead man’s oikos, as we have already seen. But they did assure that the girl was married. The same thing might perhaps have been achieved by permitting the next-of-kin to keep the estate, and to marry off the girl with a dowry; but the way chosen was more equitable, in that it ensured that the estate did indeed remain in the family of the epikleros, by mandating her marriage to the next-of-kin, and it further protected her rights by delivering it to the Kyrieia of her sons as soon as they were of an age to manage it. A modern woman would surely prefer a free choice of husband to this “equitable’ solution; but here we are introducing an idea that was foreign to Athenian law, for in fact, no woman was entitled to choose her own husband. Other women’s husbands were chosen by their fathers; they might indeed get more consideration from their fathers than the epikleros could get from the law, but they never had a free choice. But if free choice was not important to the Athenians, seeing to it that the woman was married most definitely was. It was a matter of concern, even in the normal case, to the family as a whole, and even to friends and to the state. To permit a woman to grow old unmarried was, to the Athenians, one of the foulest things that could be done to her. Litigants pleaded for sympathy on the grounds that they needed dowries for their marriageable daughters; °? they attacked their opponents by accusing them of causing women to remain old maids.'®? (One particularly notorious pleader combines the two by attacking his opponent for not dowering the pleader’s daughters).'°* Lysias gives a vivid picture of the crimes.of the Thirty Tyrants, when he says that they caused citizens exile, shameful death, loss of civil rights — and women to remain unmarried.'°° Even a husband on his deathbed — even one divorcing his wife, if the divorce was amicable — was likely to make arrangements for his wife to be remarried immediately to some-

body else, ‘so that she not be left a widow’.'°° Aristotle’s will arranged , not only a marriage for his daughter, but a substitute bridegroom in case the intended one should die before children were born.’®” In view of all this, we should hardly be surprised if the Greeks were willing to

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 42 modify their inheritance law to prevent leaving the epikleros’ marriage dependent upon the willingness of her next-of-kin to give up her estate; and the less so when we consider, that marriage to a near relative was still considered very desirable even in the classical period.’ That the marriage of the epikleros was conceived to be arranged for her benefit — faute de mieux, perhaps, but for her benefit — is shown in the case, already mentioned, of the law at Thurii. For here, where the law of a poor epikleros had been, as at Athens, optional (she might either be married by the next-of-kin or given away with a dowry to another), it was made obligatory, and the option of choosing a different husband forbidden, on the pleading of an epikleros herself, whose nextof-kin had not lived up to his responsibility .°” When Plato came to describe the best state he thought practical, he included in its constitution the law of the epikleros. ‘But’, he wrote, ‘if aman should suffer some unexpected misfortune (i.e., die intestate) and leave females, let us forgive the lawmaker if he arranges the daughters’ marriage with regard to two out of the three (relevant circumstances), nearness of relationship and preservation of the family estate; and as for the third matter which a father would have considered — choosing from among all the citizens, with an eye to character and personality, the one suited to be a son to himself and a husband to his daughter — this he will pass over, because it is impossible to consider’.'’® That Plato has the good of the family and the state uppermost in his mind — in the Laws, since no one may occupy two kleroi, the children will indeed remain in the household of the epikleros’ father — is entirely consistent with the rest of his political philosophy; but it is also worth noting that he considers the law to be an answer to the question: how shall we arrange this girl’s marriage?

| Epikleroi outside of Athens. The form that was taken by the laws and institutions surrounding the epikleros at Athens was, as we have seen, dictated by the nature of the Athenian family and of the Kyrieia exercised by the head of the family over its members. In places where the family structure was different, we should expect to find differences in the epiclerate; but we must also remember that the same institution may serve different functions in different places, and that its best-attested manifestation is not necessarily the original one, nor the most widespread. From most of Greece we have only isolated tidbits. A Tegean law of the time of Alexander provided for returning exiles with a passage limiting inheritance claims: ‘The returning exiles are to receive back the paternal inheritance from which they were exiled, and the maternal inheritance of a mother who had been unmarried and in possession of the property, and had not had a brother; and if it happened that after a woman had

The Epikleros 43 been given in marriage, both her brother and his line died, such property is also to be considered a maternal inheritance, but no farther.’ '!! Each exile could claim only his father’s estate, or one of which his mother had been, or had become, epikleros. The limitation to the children of epikleroi who were unmarried, or of women who became epikleroi in exile, is puzzling: why should not the children of an epikleros who was married at the time of the exile inherit as well? I suspect that they did inherit the estates, as part of their paternal inheritance: that is, their fathers had already been legally possessed of the estates at the time of the exile, by virtue of their marriage to the epikleroi. If the husband of the epikleros was indeed the legal Kyrios of her property, with a title strong enough to ensure his sons’ succession, then he was better treated in Tegea than anywhere else we know of; but other explanations may perhaps be possible. It should be noted that nothing in the inscription informs us whether these women were normally married to their nextof-kin or to outsiders. Laws from Naupactus'’* and of Thermus’? indicate that women in those places, as in the rest of Greece, had the right to inherit in the absence of males. Daughters are explicitly mentioned in the Naupactus law, and very probably appeared in the Thermus law, of which only a small fragment survives; but we cannot say in either case which of the rules of the epiclerate may have operated. The will of Epicteta of Thera includes in the list of her relatives a man named “Antisthenes son of Isocles, but by adoption son of Grinnus’''* — apparently an adoptive brother. In Athens, the existence of an adoptive brother would imply that her father had left no sons; the adoption would have entailed the responsibility of marrying his daughter. Antisthenes was not Epicteta’s husband, but there are a number of other possibilities. He may have been married to a sister of Epicteta’s; or the law of Thera may not have compelled him to marry her in order to get a portion of the estate; or his adoption may have been limited to a ritual significance, most likely the responsibility for carrying on the cult at Grinnus’ tomb. Only the first of these three possibilities would be definitely consistent with Attic law, but that does not mean much; according to Attic law Epicteta probably could not have made a will at all. At any event the right of women to inherit at Thera is certain, for Epicteta is in control of the money of her husband and of her sons (all of whom died before the time of the will), and her daughter — her only remaining child — is heiress of her estate. About Lacedaemon we know slightly more. The existence of an epiclerate is attested by Herodotus: “The kings are the sole judges of these cases only: concerning a maid who is a patrouchos, to whom she is

awarded in marriage, if her father has not betrothed her...’ The kings of Sparta, then, performed the function of epidikasia — but they

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 44 did so only if the father had not betrothed the woman to another man. That they were governed by the rules of kinship is suggested by the marriage of Gorgo, Cleomenes’ only daughter, to his heir Leonidas,'*® though royal marriages are not good evidence for normal practice. The later testimony, from Aristotle and Plutarch, is less direct. Aristotle criticizes Sparta for permitting free testamentary disposition, and adds, ‘Now it is possible to give an epikleros to whomever one pleases; and if a man should die intestate, whoever is left as heir gives her to whomever he wishes’.'!” This, as we have seen, was not the case in Athens. It would seem from Aristotle’s phrasing that the anchisteus in such a case remained heir, presumably giving the girl a dowry; but the opposite is suggested by Plutarch’s remark that Leonidas, a century later, did not want to let Agiatis marry anyone but his son Cleomenes because she was ‘the epikieros of a large estate’.'!® The importance of a rich epikleros in Sparta, if Plutarch is correct, can be gauged by the fact that Leonidas was the king. Our information about patroiokol, as they are called at Gortyn, is relatively abundant, filling two columns of the Gortynian Code. Here the institution was significantly different from the Athenian epiclerate; the rules of Gortyn show concern for the family and for the tribe, and for the woman’s freedom as opposed to her protection. We may begin, though the law does not, with the definition: “(A

woman) is to be a patroiokos if there is no father nor brother from the same father’.'!? She was, as at Athens, to be married to her next-of-kin — but the only eligible relatives were (a) her paternal uncles, or (b) their sons.'*° This restriction is designed, of course, to prevent the estate of the father from leaving the grandfather’s family; if the father had had no brothers, there was considered to be no claimant (epiballon), and the girl was free to marry whomever she pleased of her own tribe.'7’ Children of aunts, or relatives on the maternal side, had no claim at all, since they belonged to different oikoi; nor did paternal relatives more distant than first cousins have any claim. This point is of great importance, for it shows us at the outset that we are dealing with an institution different in structure from the Athenian. The law of the patroiokos was not regulated by simple inheritance law; in Gortyn, as at Athens, sisters and their descendants had a place in the inheritance after brothers and their descendants, but here that did not give them any rights in the adjudication of a patroiokos. The Gortynian epiclerate was indeed what the Athenian was not, a law by which the larger oikos — descendants of the dead man’s father — took care of the smaller oikos, in which now only a daughter remained. If the larger oikos was itself empty, then the law did not apply. We have no way of knowing whether the new son was considered to belong to the deceased’s oikos; indeed, we have no way of knowing

The Epikleros 45 whether such a concept would apply at all in Gortyn, since, as we shall see, the oikos in Gortyn did not occupy the place in property law that it did in Athens. It is unlikely that the Gortynian situation represents a new development; more likely it is the Athenian case that was an innovation, having assimilated the law regulating the epikleros to the general inheritance law. In Athens, where the overriding concern was to ensure the epikleros’ marriage, the law could not allow a situation in which there was no claimant at all. If the epiballon chose not to marry her, or if there was none, the entire estate belonged to the girl, and passed with her, as at Athens, into the house of her husband.'”* If, on the other hand, she refused to marry the epiballon — something which the Athenian woman could not do — she received the town-house and its contents (if there was one in the estate), and the rest of the property was divided between her and the epiballon.'3 The inequality is to be noted: in Gortyn the property was explicitly hers, as it could not be at Athens, and the epiballon could claim only part of the property, and that only if she refused to marry him. If, as is likely, her ability to do so was an innovation, the epiballon’s claim here may simply be an indemnity for the monetary loss caused him. In this situation, it was obviously to the advantage of each party to force the other to refuse the match: the epiballon, in particular, could simply protest his willingness to marry her without actually doing so, and thereby prevent her from marrying anybody else unless she was willing to give up half the estate. It must have been against this possibility that the law established a time limit on the epiballon’s rights. If he had been a minor, entitled to support from the estate, he is deprived of this from the time he reaches puberty’** until he marries the girl; when he comes of legal age, if he still refuses to marry her, her relatives complain to the judge — even in Gortyn it was not the girl herself who would appear in court — and the judge orders him to marry her within two months. If he still fails to do so, the patroiokas goes to the next-ofkin after him, if there is one, and when all the epiballontes have been exhausted, she is free to marry an outsider.'”° If the woman became a patroiokos when she was already married, she might choose to maintain her marriage or to dissolve it.’*° If she chose the latter, the epiballon might claim her only if she had no children; once she had children, she divided the estate — with whom is not clear!?”? — and could marry whomever she pleased within her tribe. Similarly, if her husband died and left her no children, the next epiballon might marry her, but if she had children, she was free to marry whomever she pleased within the tribe.'?® This distinction between the woman who had borne children and the one who had not was very probably in effect at Athens; there, however, she could be claimed in the middle of her marriage, and

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 46 so neither her husband’s death nor her own wishes would affect the situation. As long as the patroiokos was a minor, her paternal relatives managed the estate and received half the income. If there was no epiballon — in which case the paternal relatives would have less interest in the property — the girl herself was in charge of it, and was cared for by her mother or maternal relatives; a later innovation provided for her paternal and maternal relatives to manage the estate, and receive half the income.'2? Merriam'™ rightly compared this to the law of Charondas, whereby the property of orphans was managed by paternal kinsmen, the orphans themselves by maternal kinsmen — an arrangement praised by Diodorus because it put in charge of the money those who, as possible heirs, would take the best care of it, and in charge of the children those who, not being heirs, could not gain by the children’s death.'?’ In Athens — despite a law attributed to Solon ‘that no one is to be a guardian, to whom the estate devolves in case of the orphans’ death’ '*? — the anchisteus seems also to have been eligible to act as guardian.'*? In the case where, in Gortyn, the epiballon was a minor, the patroiokos — if she was willing to wait for his majority — received the house (if there was one), and the epiballon received half the income.'** Who, in this case, managed the

property, is not mentioned.'* In Gortyn as in Athens, special measures were prescribed to help the impoverished patroiokos find a husband. She — or her paternal and maternal relatives — could sell or mortgage property to pay off the estate’s debts.'°° That an unmarried girl could sell or mortgage property is not attested for any case anywhere else in Greece; that relatives of a property owner could sell the property, even during the owner’s minority, contradicts an important principle of the Code, and is obviously designed to make the indebted patroiokos more marriageable. In a later enactment, the heirs were entitled to refuse the estate entirely if it was burdened with debt; it is not expressly stated whether this applied to patroiokoi as well.'>’ Also, I believe, directed at the poor heiress is the law applying when she can find no husband: ‘If there should be no claimants for the patroiokos as prescribed, she is to have the property and marry whomever she wishes of her tribe. If no one of her tribe wishes to marry her, the patroiokos’ maternal relatives are to announce throughout the tribe that ‘Doesn’t anyone want to marry her?’ And if anyone marries her, he is to do so within thirty days of their announcement; if not, she is to marry whomever she can.’ ‘°° No patroiokos could marry out of her tribe, and if she could find a mate within it — a regulation which may be based on a geographic division of the land, or at least the city, by tribes? — but when the choice lay between the tribe’s prerogatives and a woman’s marriage, the Gortynians chose as the Athenians did. The woman was to marry ‘whomever she can’, and

The Epikleros 47 not to grow old a spinster. It is certain that the Gortynian epiclerate came from the same roots as the Athenian; but its structure has been modified radically by two main principles that dominate the Gortynian law, namely, that each member of the family is an independent property owner, and that a woman may decide whom she wishes to marry. Behind these two principles, it might be possible to claim that the Gortynian rules had once been, like the Athenian, a paternalistic system designed to ensure the marriage of the patroiokos. It might be posssible; but it is surely a simpler hypothesis to believe that it was what it looks like, a rule designed to keep the estate — with its property and, presumably, its sacred rites — within the larger family. The Gortynian law is surely concerned with keeping property within the tribe, and a similar concern with the extended family is in line with its general tenor. If so, we have in the epiclerate an interesting case in which the same institution, arising from the same roots, has come to serve different purposes in different societies. Which of these two was the original purpose — or if, perhaps, the original purpose was not quite like either of them — is a matter of speculation, in which the reader is free to indulge, if he pleases.

4

Economic Authority of the Kyrios Transactions ‘with her kyrios’. Where property belonged to the family, it was the head of the family who had ultimate control over it, for the maintenance of the family’s income implies ability to manage the estate; if the family’s lands could be sold or given away by the wife, the husband might at any time be deprived of the means to feed his household. In most of Greece, control of property was assured to the kyrios by the rule that the transactions of other members of the family were valid only with his approval. This applied to all dependent members of his household, including his wife, his unmarried daughters, his minor sons, his elderly parents, and any other relatives (sisters, nieces, grandparents) who might be living with him. It did not apply, in the historical period (if it ever had), to adult males of sound mind, who were considered by the law to be their own Kyrioi; thus we find, for example, father and son contributing independently to the same fund,’ with neither requiring the other’s agreement. When adult males lived in the same household, they did so as partners; this was often the case with brothers? and we have two examples — both from Athens — of a father and son who seem to have shared an undivided estate? Within a limited circle, the title of kyrios seems to have been well defined. At a woman’s birth, her father was her kyrios; at his death, her brothers. When she married, her husband assumed the economic responsibilities of the kyrios,’ though he did not have the right to give her in marriage to a third party (at least, not in his lifetime)? After her husband’s death or retirement, her sons became her kyrioi. Outside of these relatives, however, the law seems to have allowed more leeway. In Chaeronea, the manumission inscriptions show us cases of all the relatives mentioned acting as kyrioi,° in addition to the hierarchos, who appears to have been the Kyrios of all hieroi and hierai of this particular cult, whether they were married or not;’ but beyond this circle we have four documents where the woman is assisted simply by ‘friends’. These ‘friends’ — who may in fact have been more distant relatives> — did not have the same authority as the nearer relatives; the former always appear in groups of two or three, the latter, with one exception,’ alone. It is possible that these ‘friends’ sufficed to authorize the transaction even when the woman had a father, brother, husband, or son who did not agree to it; much more likely, the law simply permitted a woman who had no close relatives to choose a group of men to ratify her actions. A fragment of a

Economic Authority of the Kyrios 49 law from Delphi appears to indicate that at Delphi, too, the law stipulated who was to be kyrios only when the woman had no close relatives: ‘No loans are to be made to a woman or by a woman unless the husband consents to each. And if a woman be a widow, her son is to ratify (the loan) if he is of age, or else let her lend, with one man from among her close relatives as a guarantor’.’” The text as quoted includes many conjectural additions, and may not be entirely correct; but the remnants on the stone are sufficient to indicate that we are dealing with a regulation requiring the consent of a kyrios to a woman’s loans, and the indefinite phrase ‘one man’ shows that beyond a certain point the law no longer prescribed which man was to be Kyrios. It is not impossible that the father may have been mentioned, though it is more likely that a woman in her father’s house would have been subsumed under the rules for a minor (whatever they may have been); there does not seem to be room for brothers or other relatives to have been mentioned. That a similar leeway among more distant relatives applied in Athens is suggested by a passage of Menander in which a younger uncle, too distant to claim his niece if she is an epikleros, is nevertheless able to give her in a presumably legitimate marriage if she

is not."

In those places where the agreement of the kyrios was required for all transactions, a woman could do almost anything as long as she had his approval; thus Nicareta of Thespiae and Epicteta of Thera were able to dispose of quite considerable amounts, with the consent of their Kyrioi.'* Whether or not their kyrioi could dispose of the women’s property without the women’s consent is not as clear, though it seems unlikely, for if so the women’s presence at these transactions would be unnecessary. If, indeed, they could not do so, then the law of these places must have recognized women as having property of their own — unlike Athenian law — although it considered the property subject to the control of the family’s Kyrios. One inscription of Chaeronea, in which a man and wife manumit one slave, while another is freed only by the man,'* would seem to suggest that the man could not have freed both slaves on his own; but we can hardly draw a firm conclusion from this, even for Chaeronea alone — particularly in view of the vagueness which we have already noted in legal title to slaves. Receipt of property, as long as nothing was given in return, was completely untrammelled; no kyrios was required for a woman to receive an inheritance, or a gift, or payment for services. /4 Only exchange and disposal of property required the man’s consent, since only these might injure the family’s holdings. Not every city in Greece required the kyrios’ consent to a woman’s transactions; as we have seen, it is very possible that there were places in Greece where the family was conceived as an association of individuals, in which case, indeed, there will have been no place for the economic

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 50 function of a kyrios. Our geographical information is unfortunately very spotty, for this as for other problems. At Delphi, as we have seen, the consent of a kyrios was at one time (the date of the law is between 390 and 360 before the Christian era) necessary for a woman to lend or borrow money. Later on, however, it is certain that a woman could at least manumit a slave without a kyvios: of all the manumissions, from the earliest — about 201-200 — to the end of our period, not one shows a kyrios, even though the inscriptions do occasionally mention the ‘agreement’ of parties who were superfluous.'> The same is true of Naupactus, where, of the seven inscriptions in which women manumit, not one mentions the presence or agreement of a man.'° Other places are less certain. Elatea (in Phocis) has left two documents in which women may be manumitting without Ayrioi, but the stones are not in a condition that allows any certainty.'’ Also from Elatea is a decree of the people whereby the city and a woman named Menecleia jointly free a slave “who used to be the servant of Lampron (Menecleia’s father)’.'® The reason for the state’s interference is unclear, but it seems likely that the woman is not acting with a kyrios.’” From Chaeronea, on the other hand, we have no fewer than twentytwo manumissions in which a man, almost always a relative, is ‘present’ at the act of a woman. Only one exception appears to be certain, and we must presume this to be due to an omission in inscribing the stone.”° It is, as far as I know, the only example of such an omission; but we have other stones in which the agreement of the kyvios is placed not in its normal position, but at the end, and I suspect that these are cases where the Kyrios was neglected at first and added only by afterthought.*' We have no other large body of manumissions — those of Thessaly record not the freeing of the slave, but the payment of a freedmen’s tax, and are in any event too concise to be conclusive — but those we have all support the generalization that the agreement of the woman’s kyrios was required in Boeotia, but not in Phocis or Aetolia. The loan of Nicareta indicates that a Kyrios was similarly required for business transactions in Boeotia;’* we have no evidence as to whether or not a Phocian or Aetolian woman could do other business without a kyrios.?? Where manumissions fail, we must rely on isolated stones. At Tenos,”* Amorgos,”> Cos,?° Thera,?’ Delos,?® and Rhodes*’ among the islands, and at Olymus,*° Mylasa,*! and Erythrae*®” in Asia Minor, we find women

who act with their kyrioi; at Dodona we have one counter-example,°° and from Calauria in the Peloponnese comes a stone without a kyrios — but this is perhaps a matter of accident, with only an excerpt of the will being quoted.’ These scattered stones may suggest a pattern, but they certainly do not prove anything beyond the place and time from which they come, and it may be best, for the present, to avoid generalizations

about these areas. ,

Economic Authority of the Kyrios D1 It may be assumed, a prion, that there was a lower limit to the type of transaction that required a kyrios, at least in practice. A woman is not likely to have needed a kyrios to buy ribbons, or even to sell them. For Delos, we have interesting confirmation of this in the records of the hieropoioi, who managed the temple property and submitted an annual accounting, which was inscribed on stone. Of the transactions involving women, seven have the women acting without Kyrioi, dealing with sums from five to twenty-five drachmas; ten have the women acting with kyrioi, with sums from ten to more than eight hundred drachmas.”° It would appear that at Delos, while there were certainly sums too small to require a kyrios and sums too large to be transferred without one, there was no clear legal minimum, so that within a certain intermediate area a woman might require a kyrips or not — probably depending at least partly on the demands of the party with whom she was dealing. Thus we find a woman paying, in the same inscription, a hundred and thirty drachmas with her kyrios, and later five drachmas without him; *° another woman pays two identical payments of ten drachmas and half an obol, now with her kyrios, now without.*” The frequency with which women appear in the manumissioninscriptions and in the later accounts from Delos suggests that there was at this later period no impropriety attaching to a woman’s dealing in business — that, in fact, an important social reason for the powers of the kyrios had disappeared. It is worth noting that at Naupactus, where women apparently did not need a kyrios for their transactions, a woman might even be head of a household — at least, so it seems from the participation of a woman who is apparently both mother and orphanophylax of the children in one manumission.*®> Much more noteworthy is an

inscription of about the year 250 from Erythrae, in which a priesthood is bought by ‘Astynous son of Euthynus and his guardian Nosso daughter of Simus and Nosso’s kyrios, Theophron son of Demetrius; 200 (?) drachmas, sales-tax 10 drachmas, guarantor Theophron son of Demetrius’.°? Here we find a woman as guardian (epitropos), even though her action must be approved by her kyrtos. Now, a guardian is appointed to take the place of the family’s head in managing its business; when a woman was considered naturally incapable of being the head of a family, she could not have been appointed anybody’s guardian. The fact that we do find a woman with this function in Erythrae can only mean that the incapacity of women had degenerated into a legalism: a woman’s actions were performed with a kyrios, but whoever appointed Nosso guardian of the children did not think that she was therefore incapable of managing the estate. The same development is shown in a Boeotian inscription,*° where an officious scribe has noted the husband’s presence as kKyrios at a manumission which he performed jointly with his wife: the presence of the

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece D2 kyrios is not being recorded to safeguard his rights (since his presence and agreement were obvious from his participation), but simply to fulfil the rule that a woman must have a kyrios ratify her actions. The Eu... who ratifies the agreement of Arcouse to her husband’s loan in a fractured inscription of the Delian hieropoioi*' is similarly none other than her husband himself, recorded through another excess of bureaucratic zeal. These two scribes were indeed careful to maintain the kyrios’ position; but their misunderstanding is an indication that the reason for the law was no longer obvious. The kyrios at Athens. The only Athenian law we know of dealing with the capacity of a woman to transact business is preserved for us by Isaeus: “for the law explicitly provides that a child is not to be capable of performing a transaction, nor a woman beyond (the value of) a medimnus of barley’.*? The same law is cited by a scholiast on Aristophanes® and by Dio Chrysostom; ™ the latter selects it as an example of distrust and mentions that it applied “among the Athenians’, which seems to suggest that we are dealing with a regulation more restrictive than the common Greek rule. The language of the law indicates that a woman could make transactions for less than the value of a medimnus, and there is nothing in either the law or the literature to suggest that she needed the approval of her kyrios to do so. A medimnus, according to Kuenen-Janssens, was about six days’ food supply for an ordinary family; the law, then, appears intended to permit the woman to do her week’s marketing, while preventing her from spending large amounts of a family fortune — that is, it divides economic transactions into two groups, those which fall into the wife’s domain and those which are the exclusive prerogative of the kyrios.* Included in the wife’s domain are small purchases and transactions of all kinds, not merely grocery-shopping. The language of the law also seems, on simple reading, to forbid all transactions by a woman for larger sums. It mentions nothing about situations in which such transactions might be permitted, and we might have presumed that they would simply be invalid. Unfortunately, however, for this interpretation, we have many examples of women dealing with much larger amounts. We know from the orators of a woman who gave

| a gift of three hundred drachmas;* of another who lent her son-in-law eighteen hundred drachmas;*’ of a third who gave her children two thousand drachmas, though another son seems to have objected successfully after her death.*® From inscriptions we know of a woman who sold seventy drachmas’ worth of reeds for construction work, apparently in a single transaction.”? The female cloak-seller whose tombstone is preserved was doing a poor business if she sold her cloaks for less than the value of a medimnus of barley,°° and the woman who appears to

Economic Authority of the Kyrios 53 have been collector of an eranos-loan — a loan collected from a group of friends, rather than borrowed from a single lender — must have solicited contributions of more than six drachmas apiece.°’ But only one of these transactions was challenged, as far as we know, and we are not told on what grounds. Two solutions to the problem have been proposed. The simplest solution supposed that the law had lapsed.°* There is nothing unreasonable about the proposal, but it is chronologically impossible. Isaeus was still able to adduce the law in the seventies of the fourth century; °° but Aristophanes in the Plutus had produced an old woman complaining about the waste of gifts which included four medimni of wheat — surely worth more than a single medimnus of barley.°* Even if we reject his evidence (as we often must in matters of law), the arrangements made by Philo’s mother for her burial, involving the gift of three minae, date from the beginning of the fourth century, if not earlier, and cannot be explained by a hypothetical lapse or repeal of the law which Isaeus quoted decades later.°> Another explanation seems preferable. Another explanation has, in fact, been preferred. The assumption has been almost universal>* that the law did not, as it seems to, forbid all transactions above the specified sum, but merely transactions performed without consent of the woman’s kyrios. It has been presumed, therefore, that the transactions mentioned were all performed with the consent of the women’s kyrioi, but that this consent was not recorded. This hypothesis has the advantage of bringing Attic law into line with the law of other Greek cities; but other than that it has little to recommend it. In point of fact, we have no example of an Athenian woman transacting business with the official consent of her Kyrios. The Attic equivalent of the manumission-inscriptions, the ‘manumission bowls’ dedicated by freedmen, do indeed list a minor with a kyrios,*’ but since this is commemorating the result of a trial, the presence of the Xyrios is to be taken not as a validation of the manumission, but as an indication that the minor was represented in court by his guardian. A stone from the agora, as published by Fine, reads Boundary stone of a field and house mortgaged by prasis epi lyset for a dowry of twenty minae

D.....of Melite,°® |

toM......and her kyrios

but this, even if correctly restored (Fine expresses some hesitancy), cannot represent a transaction on the part of the woman. The land is being offered to the woman and her kynos as security for her dowry; but the dowry had been given by the kyrios, not the woman, and it was to him, not to her, that it had to be returned. The woman herself neither gave nor received money, and her mention on the stone indicates merely that

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 54 it was her dowry that was in question. We have other stones on which the woman is named with her father:”” in Fine’s stone the Kyrios is mentioned because, the girl’s father being dead, another kyrios had given her in marriage.©? We cannot infer anything about his economic powers. The presumption, then, that the agreement of the kyrios added any legal strength to the transactions of an Athenian woman has no argument to support it except analogy. The context in which Isaeus quotes the law, in fact, tends rather to imply the opposite, for he uses it to assert that the speaker’s uncle, who died a minor, could not have made a will: if the law prevented him only from making a will without the agreement of his kyrios, the speaker would have no case, for the hypothetical will, in favour of the son of the boy’s guardian, would hardly have lacked the guardian’s approval. If Isaeus is not misusing the law (as of course, he may be), we should conclude that a minor in Athens could not perform a transaction ‘with his kyrios’; ® we must then suppose that the law meant one thing when it spoke of a minor and another when it spoke of a woman. This, too, is not impossible, but our hypothesis now requires us to believe that the law was inconsistent; that it was incomplete, in that it failed to mention that a woman could transact business with her Kyrios; and that all our testimonies of women transacting business are either exceptional or incomplete, while the normal form of transaction was one that is nowhere attested. None of these, I repeat, is impossible, but some discomfort at accepting all of them may be understandable. We will do better, I think, to remember what the law says, and who is protected by it. If a woman cannot make a transaction, then the transaction is void; that is, if it were to come into court, the court would award the property as if the transaction had not taken place. If, for example, a woman sells me a house, her kyrios may object that she was not competent to sell it; the house will then have to be returned to her. But I doubt whether I could have taken possession of the house, refused to pay, and defended myself in court on the grounds that her transaction was illegal; if the transaction was illegal, I have no business in the house at all. The law protects the kyrios, not the man who enters into contract with the woman. Now, the law was a very old one, as is shown by its use of a measure of barley, rather than a sum of money, for the limit of a transaction. Attic society had changed since its passage, and we should not expect to find Athens of the fourth century reflecting the same situation as that which had produced the law. Athens in the early period had been much more dominated by family organization than it was in the fourth century; and we must presume that the tendency to think of property as family property — and therefore, as an asset in the hands of the kyrios, whether it had come to him from his own inheritance or his wife’s — was even

Economic Authority of the Kyrios IS stronger in the earlier period, though it was certainly not dead at the time of the orators. The law Isaeus quoted was not, I believe, a qualification to the more common Greek law that a woman’s actions required the consent of her Kyrios, but an alternative to it. The common Greek law distinguished property acquired by a woman (which could be alienated, in all probability, only by her, with the consent of her Kyrios) from that acquired by a man (which could be alienated only by him); the kyrios could protect himself against wasting of the family’s resources by not agreeing to transactions of which he disapproved. The Athenian law, on the other hand, regarded all property, regardless of its source, as belonging to the family, and distributed the right to alienate it according to each member’s function: the wife could manage the household finances as she pleased, which implied a free hand in small transactions — and I know of no reason to doubt that she could spend money that her husband had acquired as well as money that she had acquired; her management of domestic finances would require this — while management of larger transactions was reserved to the husband. The existence of such a law, however, does not make it actually impossible for a woman to alienate property; it makes it possible for her kyrios to claim at law any property so alienated. It follows that the woman may in fact do as she pleases, as long as the other party is satisfied that the Kyrios does not intend to challenge her action. The indication of consent by the kyrios was formalized in the rest of Greece as a transaction ‘with her Kyrios’, but whether or not we choose to believe that such an act was legally valid in Athens, the fact is that it will have been hard for anyone to challenge. The Kyrios was in no position to challenge an act to which he had already agreed; the second party was no better off; and challenge by an outsider would only result in returning the money to the woman and her kyrios. The practical effect of this will be seen if we look at the most celebrated case, the 1800 drachmas which Polyeuctus’ wife lent her son-inlaw Spudias. The loan was recorded in a contract witnessed by her brothers and left behind at her death, and the speaker demands that it be returned to the estate.’ Scholars, always eager to reconcile contradictory texts, have presumed that the brothers were not in fact present as witnesses, but as kyrioi.®’ The speaker, according to this interpretation, means to say that the brothers were present then as Ayrioi, and are present now as witnesses. There is, however, no great likelihood that her brothers were in fact her kyrioi — her sons-in-law would be more likely candidates — and in any event, the passage cannot mean what, by this interpretation, it must. “There are papers’, says the speaker, ‘which she left when she died, and the woman’s brothers (were) witnesses, being present at the entire proceeding and inquiring about each particular (martyres d’ hoi tés gynaikos adelphoi parontes hapasi kai kath’ hekaston

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 56 eperotontes), so that we would have no unpleasantness towards each other’.™ ‘Breviloquentia’ cannot explain why the speaker said martyres . .. parontes in place of kynioi.. . parontes if what he meant was ‘they were present as kyrioi’, nor why he used the present participles instead of the aorist if his meaning was ‘they are now witnesses, having then been present at everything and having asked about all the particulars’. It is more reasonable to presume that the speaker means what he says, for that story will suffice: the brothers, even if they were kyrioi, could not challenge a document they had witnessed; their presence would have made the document strong enough for them to rely on, at least in dealing with their relative (for he could not have challenged it — if the loan was improper, then he had no business taking the money, and would have to return it immediately anyway), and strong enough for the speaker to attempt to collect the debt in court, though we do not know if he succeeded. Similar are the gifts made by Archippe to her sons: her husband, Phormio, was not likely to object to them, and a challenge from anyone else would simply have returned the money to him.® Philo’s mother must also have had the tacit approval of her son (if he was her kyrios) in leaving three minae to a friend for her burial, despite the fact that the speaker of Lysias 31 takes her action to be a disgrace to Philo. On the other hand, the statement of Apollodorus that his mother was ‘no longer Kyria of her property . .. so as to give me as much as she wished’ °’ can only mean that she was in fact incapable of giving away her property as long as her kyrios, Phormio, opposed it. These cases do provide evidence that women engaged in transactions above what the law of Isaeus 10 prescribed as their legal capacity; but they are not evidence of transactions ‘with her Kyrios’, for they were not open to challenge by anyone who stood to benefit from their nullification, and so the question of their legality or illegality was moot. Women might, as we saw, make sales in the marketplace that were above their legal capacity, though such sales were not the rule; I doubt whether their husbands were always present (or summoned) for such transactions. A man who bought from a female cloak-seller no more expected her husband to run after him and attempt to void the sale than one who bought from another tradesman expected to be attacked with a claim that the goods were stolen. If in this respect the practice of the fourth century did not match precisely the intentions of a law that was probably some two centuries old or older, that is no cause for surprise. It is less surprising when we note that the women who transact business so freely are mostly of nonAthenian (that is, non-citizen) origin, or else widows living in the house of relatives rather more distant than father or husband, and more likely, perhaps, to keep their property — their dowry, or whatever they had been able to salvage from their husband’s household — separate from that of their kyrios.

Economic Authority of the Kyrios 57 If the woman was not legally competent to dispose of her property, then her kyrios probably was. In my opinion, everything we know about Athenian property law as it related to women supports this conclusion. The epikleros was in a sense an heiress, in that the estate always passed to the otkos of which she was a member; but the property was her husband’s, and the only check upon her husband’s ability to spend it was the danger of a lawsuit when her children came of age and took it over. We know that a woman at Athens was legally able to inherit from her brother, cousin, uncles, or — probably — nephew, and she could certainly inherit his lands as well; but all the farms and houses we know of in Attica appear to have been considered the property of men, unless they belonged to an epikleros awaiting adjudication, or were attached to a dowry. Indeed the dowry itself was clearly the husband’s to dispose of, as long as the marriage lasted, although elsewhere, in Gortyn and probably in Sparta, the dowry was a gift to the wife personally. Along with the dowry came the girl’s trousseau; it was indeed intended for her personal use, but it undoubtedly passed into the kyrieia of her husband, who could sue for its value if she removed it without his having ‘returned’ it to her. It is possible to argue that the trousseau had a special status, that it was a gift to the husband while other property remained the wife’s to dispose of, with his consent. As we have seen, there rarely was any other property; and I doubt in any event whether a man who could dispose of the clothes on his wife’s back could be restrained from disposing of the rest of her fortune as well. In attempting to find a clear and direct indication, we are again stymied by the nature of our sources. Thrasyllus, the speaker of Isaeus 7, claims that land belonging to his (adoptive) aunts was sold by their husbands for five talents; © but since he is trying to show the irresponsible way in which his opponents have mishandled the estate, his words are to be taken with a grain of salt. Not much more can be squeezed out of the claim of Demosthenes that Aphobus would have become kyrios of four talents allegedly deposited with Demosthenes’ mother, had he married her; ” the implication is clearly that he could have spent them as he spent Demosthenes’ money, but we are dealing here with buried treasure, not an outright gift to which his mother’s title would have been clear. We have no direct evidence for our presumption, and cannot consider the matter to be finally decided on the basis of inference. But what we do know seems to indicate that the Athenian man was kyrios of the property of all the members of his family, and free to do with it as he pleased. In point of fact, there were few cases in which his wife would have owned much property; her dowry was his, not hers, and the most common case of a woman inheriting was that of the epikleros, who was under the special protection of the law. There does not, however, seem to have been any particular protection for an heiress who was not an

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 58 epikleros,”' and it is hard to see by what means such an heiress could force the return of her inheritance in case of divorce. Whether the courts would have allowed a plea of epiklérou kakosis in her case, or subsumed it under some other heading, or whether, perhaps, she may have had no legal recourse,’* I do not know, nor is any such case preserved for us. Socially, at least, it is unlikely that the husband who deprived her of her inheritance would have been considered less of a scoundrel than the husband who abused the fortune of an epikleros or of a well-dowered wife. The kyrios at Gortyn. Traces survive at Gortyn of the authority that was wielded in the rest of Greece by the kyrios. A father or brother,” or even a husband or son,’* might give a woman a dowry, and the expression patros dontos @ adelpio (‘when she has been given by a father or a brother’) in the Code’> indicates that marriage in Gortyn still took the form of a gift from the previous kyrios to the husband. The right to decide whether or not to expose a child belonged in the first instance to its father or (if he was a serf) its father’s master; ”° if the woman was an unmarried serf, her father’s master (or her brothers’ masters) made the decision.’’ It is possible that the fine for adultery was higher for a woman whose kyrios was a member of the inner group — that is, a father, brother, or husband — than for one whose kyrios was a more distant relative.7®

Of the essential economic power of the kyrios, however — the requirement of his consent to transactions of the other members of the oikos — there is no trace. Or rather, there is a trace, for the Code specifically legislates against it: As long as the father lives, the father’s property is not to be bought or taken on mortgage from a son; whatever he himself (i.e. the son) has acquired by purchase or inheritance he may alienate, if he pleases. Nor may the father (alienate) whatever his children themselves have acquired by purchase or inheritance. Nor may the husband alienate

or pledge the property of his wife, nor a son the property of his mother. And if anyone buys or takes on mortgage or accepts on pledge otherwise than is prescribed, as of the time when these laws are inscribed, the property is to belong to the mother and to the wife, and the seller or mortgager or pledger is to pay double to the buyer or mortgagee or recipient of the pledge, and if there is any further penalty, its simple value; previous matters are not to be justiciable. But if the second party contends about the disputed item that it is not the mother’s or the wife’s, he is to bring an action in the appropriate place, before the judge in the place prescribed for each type of

action.’

This is not simply a rule against selling other people’s property — that could have been said in many fewer words; it is a law abolishing the econ-

Economic Authority of the Kyrios 59 omic power of the kynos. To begin with the second part, the power of a husband to dispose of his wife’s goods — and in Gortyn, this included her dowry — is not to exist; nor is the power of a son to dispose of his mother’s goods. These are not simply examples of women vulnerable to exploitation; they are women whose goods were, in other states, under the kyrieia of the men named. These men are, in fact, the most common kyrioi of adult women: they appear more often than anyone else in those manumission-inscriptions which mention kynoi, and they are the only kyrioi prescribed by the law of Cadys at Delphi.®’ The amnesty for their actions before the passing of this law can only mean that they had previously been prescribed as kyrioi at Gortyn as well, and that they had been possessed of the right — as I have argued that Athenian men were — to sell, mortgage, or pledge the property of their wives and mothers without the women’s consent. Under the terms of the new law, any such sale, mortgage, or pledge is invalid; the property alienated returns to the wife or mother, and the good-faith purchaser is recompensed doubly as the victim of fraud.®!

In the first clause of the law, we find abolished an aspect of the power of the kyrios with which we have not yet concerned ourselves: its transfer during the life of the kyrios. Under this system a man’s sons, when they reach a suitable age, become kyrioi of the household and assume its management; they are then responsible for maintaining their parents. We do not find such a system in full legal development anywhere in Greece; it is a stage that antedates historical society. But we do find traces of it in Athens and elsewhere, in houses like that of Euctemon, whose son shared the estate until his death,** or Menander’s Cnemon, who resigns his property to Gorgias.®? We find men whose sons are their kyrioi in the manumission-inscriptions of Chaeronea,”’ and Aristotle speaks of ‘retired old men’ who are ‘not simply’ citizens, but only citizens in a qualified sense.®° But in Gortyn, from the time of this law, no competent adult was to be kyrios of the property of another. Henceforward a father’s control of his property does not terminate until his death; and his children are free to acquire property on their own, without having it pass into the kyrieia of the father. Whether or not the children would manage their property themselves probably depended upon their age.*° Also noteworthy is the beginning of the law on division of property: ‘The father has authority over (the words karteron emen in the passage would be rendered in Attic kyrion einai) the children and the division of the property, and the mother over her own property’.®” The difference in expression between the mother’s rights and the father’s may indicate

an additional power that the father as head of the family — the right to decide whether or not to raise a child seems like a good candidate — or it may merely be a remnant of the old law, under which the father was kyrios of the entire family and its money: when the law was changed, the

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 60 authority of his wife over her own property was added, and the children (presumably minor children are meant) were all that was left in the father’s kyrieia. Under either interpretation, the difference of wording indicates an original difference in authority between man and wife; but the legal difference, at least, was dying an early death in Gortyn. We do not know why: whether the legislation was prompted by internal considerations, by a general movement that did not reach Athens, or by influence from the pre-Greek population which was still present in Crete, and in which women’s position seems to have been more independent than, for example, an Athenian woman’s was. But the Gortynian example did not become general; elsewhere, the power of the Kyrios was to survive well into the Roman period.*®

5

Exchange and Disposition Trade. The limitations on a woman’s right to conduct transactions were reflected in the marketplace — or perhaps more correctly, the social norms that gave rise to those limitations also affected the role of women in the market. Our only information, unfortunately — but not surprisingly — comes from Athens; of the small retail trade of other cities we know next to nothing. In Athens, however, it is clear that tradeswomen were common enough. We hear of kapélides and pandokeutriai, keepers of cafes where one could get a drink of wine and a meal.’ Women are attested selling salt, groats, bread, figs, beans, gruel, and sesame; one seller of clothing and one of hats are known; also sellers of perfume, incense, garlands, and ribbons; a seller of reeds, and perhaps one of hemp.’ Occasionally we can recognize a woman who is her husband’s partner. Artemis the gilder, the wife of Dionysius the helmet-maker, worked in his shop, presumably decorating his helmets,’ and one suspects that Midas and Soteris, the freedmen of Hipparchides, both of them sesame-sellers, may have been husband and wife.* Euxitheus and his mother seem to have worked together selling ribbons.> Some trades were even dominated by women: ‘And furthermore, what could possess a man, to make him sit and sell perfume, under a parasol on high, fitted out for a meeting-place for teenagers to babble in all day long?”° In spite of all this, there is little question that the agora was dominated by men. For certain trades women are completely unattested: armaments, books, and animals were sold exclusively by men, and the closest we come to a woman in the metal trade is Artemis the gilder, mentioned above. Even those trades in which women were found were practiced by men as well, and probably dominated by them.’ The perfume trade had, according to Athenaeus, been forbidden to men by Solon, and Pherecrates, quoted above, speaks of it as if it were a feminine monopoly; but a fragment of Lysias, preserved in the same passage of Athenaeus, shows clearly enough that by the beginning of the fourth century men were involved in this business, too.® Whether they actually sold perfumes in the market, or had women or slaves to sell their wares for them, is not stated, but apparently the field was not devoid of men. Virtually all of the trades mentioned were unlikely to involve more than the value of a medimnus of barley. The price of a medimnus fluctuated from three’ to six’? drachmas, going as high as eighteen in times of scarcity,'’ and few retail transactions involved as much as that. Surely

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 62 Aristophanes’ innkeeper never charged such a bill: it took a demigod to eat ten obols’ worth of meat.’ When Philocleon knocked over ten obols’ worth of bread ‘and four thrown in’ (whether obols or loaves is not clear), he was probably damaging more than the bread-seller would have sold to a single customer.'? Thettale’s felt hats cost an obol and three quarters apiece.'* Nor would the stock-in-trade require purchases of more than a medimnus at a time, if supplies were either homemade or purchased fresh daily, as is likely. There were trades which dealt in larger sums, but women rarely plied them.’” Tradeswomen were poor women who had to earn their living, and much of the unpleasant commentary on them clearly reflects the disdain of the genteel for the uncouth. Thus Aeschylus is reproved in the Frogs, ‘It’s not decent for poets to revile each other like bakery-women’,'® and Chremylus identifies Poverty by her screams: POVERTY. Who do you think Iam? CHREM. An innkeeper or a porridge-seller. Otherwise you wouldn’t scream like that at us when nobody’s done you any harm."’ We also hear complaints of dishonesty and greed, the common objection of the farmer to the trader.'® While women did not sell in the market if they could avoid it — Euxitheus and his mother admit ‘that we sell ribbons, and don’t live in the manner we would like to’! — it was clearly much more respectable than working as a hired labourer. The latter was characterized even by Euxitheus as ‘menial jobs worthy of a slave’;*° no such thing could have been said of petty trade, which was dominated by free men. There was a law of Solon’s that ‘anyone who reproaches a male or female citizen with the fact that they work in the market is to be liable to an action for slander’,”' and the laws granted preferential treatment in the market place to citizens as opposed to resident aliens.** The fact that men predominated in the agora is an indication that among the small tradesmen, as among the labourers, there were many men — presumably those who could afford it — who worked for a living while their wives did not. The ideal of the woman who occupied herself with her family was not dead in the lower classes. In large-scale commerce women were extremely rare. Of the various merchants’ marks found on amphorae of the export trade, only one appears to belong to a woman.”* The public building accounts of Epidaurus, listing both construction workers and suppliers of building materials, include 269 different men and two women.** No woman, as far as we know, ever leased a mine at Laureim.*> The accounts of the hieropoioi at Delos mention one tradeswoman, Comoedia: her sales to the temple consist of five drachmas for rose-perfume and eight drachmas, one obol for a jewel-case.2° A woman named Phocis received ten drachmas to adorn an idol,?’ and another wove and embroidered garments — but a man (presumably her husband) received her pay, for

Exchange and Disposition 63 the entry reads, ‘to Sodamus for Aristo (S6damdi hdste Aristoi) for weaving and embroidering the garments’.?® The accounting-inscriptions of Delphi tell a similar story,”’ as do those of the Erechtheum at Athens,” and the accounts of the Eleusinian treasurers mention only two women.®! One of these last two women, Artemis from Peiraeus, engages in a rather large transaction, selling seventy drachmas’ worth of reeds to be used as building material. A sepulchral inscription, also from Athens, mentions one Elephantis who sold cloaks (himatia), a trade that would also have required transactions for more than the value of a medimnus

of barley.? Both of these women appear to have been resident aliens,” but they were presumably subject to the same legal restrictions as citizens, and they serve to remind us that it was not the Athenian law that restricted women to petty marketing. That we find virtually no largescale businesswomen, either in Athens or anywhere else, shows us that the Greek woman was kept out of commerce by more than the law: the ideals of her society and her own ideals, as well as the need to perform her own tasks at home, all prevented her from seeking the opportunities on which some women could capitalize. Lending and borrowing. Loans are of two basic types, commercial and charitable. In the first type the lender always expects to receive more money than he lends, whether by repayment with interest, a share in the borrower’s returns, or some other form of profit. Charitable loans are usually, but not necessarily, interest-free. The categories are not perfectly distinct; there are cases — as when a man invests money to help a friend start a business — that partake of both. Women in Greece did lend money, and they did not restrict themselves entirely to pure charity; nevertheless, we cannot find any clear indication that any women were ever professional money-lenders. The largest transaction attested for any woman is the loan by Nicareta of Thespiae to the town of Orchomenus in Boeotia, documented in a long inscription set up by the town after the repayment of the loan.°** Nicareta, with the consent of her kyrios,* had lent the town 10,085 drachmas and two obols; in another year she lent 2,500 drachmas, then 4,000, then 1,000.°° The date when these loans fell due is not recorded in the inscription, but the first loan at least was overdue when Nicareta came to Orchomenus to collect it.*’ The town was unable to repay the loan, and apparently did not expect to be able to pay it with the penalties that had now accrued; Nicareta was ‘persuaded’ (epithdse autan ha polis, lines 116-17) to accept an alternative arrangement. A new agreement was made with the town, and in addition a contract was signed with the polemarchs and the treasurer: each promised to pay 18,833 drachmas within a short time (the polemarchs and treasurer at the Pamboeotian festival the next month, the city by the end of the year).

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 64 Apparently the two contracts dealt with the same money, so that the payment of one cancelled both. The contract of the polemarchs and the treasurer was secured by their own property (‘the money may be exacted from the borrowers themselves and from their guarantors, from one or from many or from all, and from the property in their possession, and she may exact it in whatever way she wishes’, lines 29-35). The financial embarrassment of the city is obvious; whatever Nicareta’s rights were under the original contract, they were surely much better than what the city had persuaded her to accept with the heaviest personal securities it could offer. They were so much better that the city was afraid she would go back on her agreement, and refuse to accept the smaller sum offered; a clause was written into the agreement declaring that such a refusal would render the promissory notes void and make Nicareta liable to a payment of fifty thousand drachmas, almost thrice the value of the loan. Under the new contract, Nicareta was to receive only 1247 drachmas and four obols more than she had lent out — a return of slightly more than seven per cent, extremely small for two years’ time even had the loan not been overdue.*® Eventually she got the money, though not before the polemarchs had defaulted, the year had had an extra month added to it,*? and the city had passed a resolution that the loan was to be paid “from all the city’s revenues’ (line 161). The entire transaction tells us quite a bit: that there was a woman in Boeotia at the end of the third century*® who could lend more money than a sizable town could repay is in itself noteworthy, and that she was able to enforce payment of the principal, if not of all the penalties, will also caution us against underestimating the legal capabilities of a woman even in places where she required the consent of her kyrios. Nor was Nicareta the only woman to enter such a transaction: an inscription of Copae, a smaller town of Boeotia, from the same period records the town’s thanks for (and ‘gift’ of pasturage rights for four hundred head of cattle in appreciation of) a remission of its debts to two women, Cleuedra and Olympicha.*' But these women, and Nicareta as well, were acting in an exceptional situation. Many of the towns of Boeotia were in desperate financial trouble at the end of the third century: besides the two already mentioned, we have inscriptions from Lebadea,** Chorsia,*? Acraephia,™ and two more from Orchomenus™ expressing gratitude for remission of debts owed either to private individuals or, in one case from Chorsia,*° to another town. In a situation like this, a loan takes on a large element of charity, as anybody will know who has ever been asked to buy war bonds. The town of Oropus, attempting to rebuild its walls, voted automatic proxenia — an honorary title granting foreigners important preferential rights within the city — to anyone who would lend it a talent at 10 per cent interest.*” The list of people who responded to the offer begins optimistically, ‘the following

Exchange and Disposition 65 (hoide) were inscribed as proxenoi and benefactors according to the decree’; but only one name is listed. Nicareta received little, if any, interest, and seems to have been lucky to recover her principal; Cleuedra and Olympicha had to accept payment in kind. Such loans were from the start, as the Oropus inscription shows, more patriotic service than sound finance. Nevertheless, these women are the closest thing to female bankers known to us in Greece. The closest, that is, unless we count Hyperbolus’ mother; for Aristophanes, proposing that mothers of brave men should be given prohedria (preferential seating at public functions) over mothers of cowards, asks, For how can it be seemly, citizens, for Hyperbolus’ mother to sit draped in white, tresses flowing, next to Lamachus’ mother, and to lend money — when really, if she were to lend someone money and exact interest, no man ought to give her interest; no, he should grab the money away violently and say, ‘You're one to have your loans bear, after bearing such a bare-faced scoundrel!’ (axia goun ei tokou tekousa toiouton tokon).*® As most scholars have recognized, nothing can be made of this; Aristophanes was eager enough for the pun to spend three lines preparing for it, and he surely would not have let reality stand in his way. What transactions, if any, Hyperbolus’ mother may have carried on are in no way indicated. The other loans we hear about are on a much smaller scale. Polyeuctus’ wife lent eighteen minae to Spudias — a respectable sum, but still within the bounds of the family.*” The speaker of Demosthenes 41 implies that she had also lent him money. Whether or not these were loans at interest is not certain; the speaker mentions interest in connection with the loans of Polyeuctus and his wife, but he does not actually claim it. Eighteen minae was not a trifling sum, and the loan was witnessed by the woman’s brothers, and by a sealed document that was opened and confirmed at the woman’s death. The transaction involved was not truly commercial, but it was not insignificant. The mortgage-stones of Athens, as noted in chapter 1, never mention a woman as a creditor; but we do have two non-Athenian stones that seem to do so. Neither is anything like a commercial loan. One includes the provision hdste echein kai kratein (‘on condition of possession and control’) — that is, the woman is to occupy the land for the duration of the loan,°° perhaps in lieu of interest: this was not the normal practice, and we do not know why it was adopted here. The ‘hypothecation’ may mask a form of lease, or a caretaking arrangement, but it is unlikely that we are dealing with a simple loan.°' The other stone involves only ninety drachmas, very much the smallest sum preserved in any of the horoi.*? It is possible that these women made money on their loans, but they hardly seem like professionals.

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 66 A last type of loan, one that falls clearly into the category of charitable loans, is the eranos, a loan raised by contributions collected from a group of friends of the debtor and lent to him to meet some extraordinary expense.°* A very problematical stone published by Fine>* seems to include the word plérotria, the feminine of plérdtés, the term for a contributor to or collector of such a loan. This is the first direct evidence for women contributing to eranos-loans, though we should not be surprised to find it. As for women receiving eranoi, our only example is that of Neaera, who collected an eranos from her former lovers in order to buy her freedom. Aside from the eranos collected by Neaera, our only evidence for women as borrowers of money comes from the records of the hieropoioi at Delos, who lent money at interest and recorded their transactions at the end of their tenure.°° Most of the loans are granted to men; in a number of them we find recorded the consent of a woman (usually the borrower’s wife). There are also a number of loans to women, invariably with the assistance of their Kyrioi. The chronological distribution is shown in the table below. New Loans to Men

New Loans New Loans’ with Women’s

Decade to Men toWomen — Consent Others>’

ca. 250 6 0 0 l 249-240 4 0 l 0

239-230 0 0 0 0 229-220 7 0 0 0 219-210 0 0 0 0 209-200 216 12 ] l 2| 199-190 15 189-180 0 0 0 0 179-170 5 ] 2 | Totals 58 8 16 5 Most of the inscriptions have come down to us in fragments, if at all, and the loans tabulated here are only a fraction of the number of loans granted by the hieropoioi in this period; but the lists of interest payments (also fragmentary) tend to confirm the impression that more women were borrowing money in Delos in the beginning of the second century than at the end of the third. Thus in the earlier inscriptions we find few women, and they are not paying debts that they have contracted them-

Exchange and Disposition 67 selves: Alexicrateia, appearing in the year 282,°° is paying for one Arignotus, while Gorgo, who appears at the same time,°” is paying for Chares. Gorgo reappears in 274,©° paying the same sum as previously, presumably still for Chares, who is still an outstanding debtor,®’ and some time between 260 and 250 in a fragmentary line where the details have been lost. A man pays for her in 250,° but there is no reason to presume that these later debts were self-incurred any more than the first. Amphicrite and her kyrios Demonous pay interest for the lands that belonged to Pherecleides in 250; °° I assume that these had been security for a loan to Pherecleides, and had now come into Amphicrite’s possession either by inheritance or by sale. Nicaea pays interest in 218 for debts of her father™ and her brother.© Thus in the third century we have had women occasionally taking over the responsibility of men’s loans; but it is only in 209 that a woman, Lyso, appears as a contractor of a new loan.°° Thereafter women become much more common, both in the lists of interest payments — and in those of insolvent debtors. We do not know what sums were involved in these loans, but if we may judge from the sums generally lent out to men, they were not very great, mostly less than five hundred drachmas. The women who borrow the money are all married,’ so they did not borrow on their own because they lacked men to borrow for them. One woman, in fact, who borrows with the assistance of her husband around 190 is listed eleven years later

as consenting to a loan taken out by her husband. What was the difference between the two loans? Was one in fact intended for the wife’s use, and one for the husband’s? Or was the difference entirely procedural? There is no evidence that will help us answer this question now; all we can say is that women were appearing more often at the temple, either to contract loans or to approve their husbands’ loans, than they had done in the third century — or probably at any time before.” Before leaving the subject of loans, we may add a word about guarantors. It was customary for third parties, known as engyétai, to offer personal guarantees for the debtor: if the creditor could not collect from the debtor, he could collect from the guarantor. I have not made a systematic study of the matter, but among the inscriptions I have seen, I found no examples of a woman guaranteeing someone else’s loan. Even a creditor willing to lend to a woman preferred, it would seem, to have a man offer his guarantee. Wills. The power to will, which asserts the individual’s rights over his property in preference to the family’s, was new to Greece in the classical period, and it was not, at first, extended to women. At Gortyn, as we have seen, women had a good deal of legal control over their property at the time of the Code; but even here they could not determine their heirs. The law permitted no changes in the order of succession except by

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 68 adoption; and the rule was that ‘a woman is not to adopt, nor a minor’.”” At Athens the rules for adoption were apparently the same: ‘nobody is adopted away from his mother’, says Thrasyllus, trying to prove that being adopted by a new father does not change one’s right to inherit through one’s natural mother; but his way of putting it seems to imply strongly that adoptive mothers did not exist — that is, that women could not adopt.”’ Adoption involved the admission of the adopted son into a new oikos, and it could not be performed except by the kKyrios of the family. It is the claim of the speaker of Isaeus 10 that children were prevented from making wills by the law ‘that a child is not to be capable of performing a transaction, nor a woman beyond (the value of) a medimnus of barley’.’* If his claim is correct,’? it would seem to apply for a woman as well; and in fact, we do not find any cases of Athenian women bequeathing their property. A number of passages have been thought to show bequests, but all of them may be more easily seen as gifts inter vivos; the only true example we have of a woman arranging for the disposal of her property after death is Philo’s mother. ‘For she didn’t trust this man enough to commit herself to him when she was dying, but instead she put her trust in Antiphanes, to whom she was no relative at all, and gave him three minae of silver for her own burial, passing up this man (i.e., Philo), her own son.’’”*> Whether we see this as a will or as a gift inter vivos is not of great moment — if the law of Isaeus 10 prohibited one, it prohibited the other — but the point to be noted is that it did not alienate any money from her son (who was presumably her heir). She merely asked a friend to care for her funeral rites, and gave him money to do so; had she not made the gift Philo would not have been richer, unless he had been intending to skimp on the ceremonies. It was presumably for this reason that Philo did not challenge her action as, if he was her kyrios, he could have. In fact, most Athenian women seem to have had little enough that they could call their own (except their dowry, which certainly was not theirs to bequeath). In places where women had more personal property, they seem to have acquired more power over its final disposition. I know of no case of a Spartan woman’s will, but I find it unlikely that they were prevented from exercising the same rights that men had.’° The three testamentary donations that we have — one from Calauria,’’ one from Thera,’® and one from Amorgos’® — are all made in favour of cult institutions, but I doubt whether this can be taken to imply a restriction on the women’s powers; the fact is simply that private individuals did not set up inscribed stones indicating who gave them their possessions. Two of the wills mention the women’s kyrioi, while the inscription of Calauria does not — either because it is only an excerpt from the complete document,”’ or because a woman’s transactions did not require the presence

Exchange and Disposition 69 ] of a kyrios at Calauria.®’ The two which do, however — one dealing with an establishment of three thousand drachmas, another dealing with unidentifiable real estate that was mortgaged for the woman’s dowry — indicate once again that the formal requirement of approval by the kyrios did not in itself keep a woman from disposing of her property more or less as she pleased. If women did not make wills at Athens and at Gortyn, who inherited from them? Who inherited from intestate women elsewhere? We know very little. The law in Gortyn was simple enough: “The maternal property, too, is to be divided when she dies according to what is prescribed for the paternal property’®’ — that is, generally, to her children. The division, however, appears to have taken place only after the father’s

death; during his lifetime he controlled the property (ton patera kar- | teron emen ton matroion), unless he married another wife. Nevertheless, he could not sell or mortgage the property unless the children were of age and consented.®* These provisions occur immediately after the provisions cited above abolishing the economic authority of the kyrios,** and although the clause barring retroactive litigation is not repeated here, I suspect that this law, too, is an innovation. When the Kyrios had had authority over the property of the members of his household — and this authority, in Gortyn, must have included the right to sell and mortgage property that belonged to them, for that is what had to be legislated against — it is difficult to see how the death of one would have reduced his rights. He could have sold the mother’s property; he could have sold her sons’ property; it is not likely that he had been prevented from selling property of the mother that had passed to the sons. When this right was abolished, the new law still left the husband his right to manage the property as long as he lived — but not to dispose of it or encumber it. I do not know whether Athenian law specified who was heir of a woman’s property. As long as her personal property was in the power of her Kyrios during her lifetime, it would presumably remain in his power at her death, unless it formed part of her dowry; no law would be needed to establish this. But the children of a woman of some financial independence might reasonably expect to inherit from her as they inherited from their father. It was surely the daughters of Polyeuctus’ wife (or rather, their husbands) who inherited her property, but I think it probable that their husbands were her kyrioi during her lifetime as well.®° More promising, but in the end no more decisive, is the evidence of Apollodorus, who was certainly not his mother’s kyrios at her death — her second husband was still alive — but who had received a quarter share of the ‘maternal property’.®° This money, apparently the money he had collected from suing Phormio,®’ was not his mother’s dowry, for he could not inherit that once his mother had remarried; in fact, a quarter share of the dowry would have entitled him to 5500 drachmas, more than he

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 70 received.®* I rather believe that he was claiming a share in the gifts given to Archippe by Pasio in his will, out of which she had given 2000 drachmas apiece to her children by Phormio. We do not know what Apollodorus’ claim was, but I suspect that he acknowledged the validity of the gifts, and demanded an equal share for himself. If this was his plea, then he must have claimed some right to inherit from Archippe in place of her Kyrios, Phormio. Unfortunately, however, we are dealing with conjecture, and other information does not help us, for we do not know why or how the arbitrators ‘persuaded’ Phormio to pay off Apollodorus. The situation is further confounded by the fact that Apollodorus asserted that his mother was an epikleros,®? and may have based his claim to inherit on this. Whether or not a less litigious son than Apollodorus could have inherited his mother’s property at Athens — whether, indeed, Apollodorus’ claim would have been allowed by a full court — cannot be said.

Gifts. Of gifts by women to other individuals we have only the sparsest references, all from Athens. They suffice, however, to indicate to us that such gifts were unlikely to have amounted to much in that place. Gifts to members of one’s own family were respectable enough, but it is doubtful whether they could have stood up in the face of opposition. Thus Archippe, when she was dying, was (according to Apollodorus) ‘no longer kyria of her property .. . so as to give me as much as she wished’; ” that is, she could not give her money to Apollodorus, since her husband, Phormio, would oppose the gift. But it is not certain that even the husband’s approval, tacit or explicit, would always suffice, for this same Archippe did, as was just mentioned, give two thousand drachmas to her children by Phormio, only to have Apollodorus sue Phormio for an equal amount of money after her death, and win. The case, for the reasons mentioned in the last paragraph, does not tell us whether or not other women could successfully have made such preferential gifts; I doubt whether cases involving women this rich came up very often. Gifts by women to other women are not recorded anywhere — not surprisingly, in view of the overwhelmingly male sources of our information. We have, however, two examples of women giving gifts to men: the old woman of the Plutus,”' who bought the attentions of a ‘dear young man’ with gifts, and a metic named Zobia who sheltered Aristogeiton, according to the speaker of Demosthenes 25, when he was fleeing from prison, and then sent him on his way with eight drachmas and a change of clothing.”* The speaker is trying to arouse sympathy for the woman, who was later (according to him) mistreated by Aristogeiton; but he introduces her as ‘a certain woman... by the name of Zobia, with whom, probably, he had had sexual relations at one time’. We may suspect that similar assumptions attached to any woman who was too

Exchange and Disposition 71 helpful, whether by gifts or by services, to a man who was not a relative. One sort of gift to which no such stigma attached was the gift to the state, given for patriotic reasons at time of need. We have mentioned above loans of this type granted by women in Boeotia toward the end of the third century; Thompson lists in a similar vein a number of gifts given by women from the same period and somewhat later, and known from the honorific inscriptions set up by grateful citizens. One Timessa, a citizen of Amorgos, was honoured for having ransomed many fellowcitizens when they were prisoners of war;”> Negopolis and Curasio, women of Pamphylia, contributed twenty minae apiece to the rebuilding of their city walls.?* These gifts were exceptional; there is no shortage of inscriptions honouring public benefactors, and our three women are insignificant by comparison. But their benefactions were anything but shameful; and at the end of our period, as we have mentioned earlier, Diaeus was willing to make them compulsory for women as well as men.” Dedications. Our records of dedications — objects, land, or money set aside for a god and either used for cult purposes or not used at all — present a very different picture from the one we have seen in other areas. From every place in Greece, and from every age, we have items dedicated by women to various divinities, or inscriptions commemorating such dedications. It is abundantly clear that the factors that kept women from engaging in other economic activities on a large scale never prevented them from dedicating. This is not to say that women’s dedications are as common as men’s; they are much less so, the proportion for the most easily tabulated sort — altars and statue-bases”° — giving approximately three to four men for every woman. To an extent, this may reflect a difference in property control; but I think that a greater factor is the circumstance that men had more occasions to dedicate. The successful completion of a magistracy, or an athletic victory, was an occasion for dedicating something, usually a statue or the victor’s trophy; these dedications were obviously made only by men.’ Dedications on behalf of an entire family were likely to be set up by the head of the household, though they were often set up by a husband and wife jointly,”> or by a woman.” Battle-spoils were obviously the particular province of men. We might also suspect that men were more anxious to see their name or statue displayed in a public place; but the number of women’s dedications hardly displays any great reticence, at least in this area. Except for those articles which were particularly masculine (no women dedicated greaves, as one Arcadian did),'”° there was nothing which might not be dedicated by a woman as well as a man. Women dedicated land!°! and improvements to temple buildings; '°? money for sacrifices

in their names;!°? statues of their relatives;' herms,!°> sometimes

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 72 with female heads; °° vessels for the service;'”’ golden crowns;'® everyday items.’ There is no evidence that women’s gifts were generally smaller or cheaper than those of men, and such gifts as a silver censer weighing 1300 drachmas, dedicated by an Athenian woman at the beginning of the fourth century,'’° should make us aware that articles were dedicated by women that were worth much more than anything that was traded by them. In Athens, one priestess was even crowned by the demos for dedicating some items and spending a hundred drachmas ‘of her own money’ on sacrifices.’ One second-century inscription from Paros’? records a collection (apparently for the goddess of childbirth) whose contributors were all women. The sums vary from two obols to six drachmas, with only one possibly higher amount. We might have concluded that these women were truly donating their own pocket-money, but this does not seem to have been a project that required much. The women may have had more that they could have given, had it been asked of them. These generalizations, it should be noted, are true for all of Greece. The remains from Athens, from Boeotia, from the Peloponnese, from the islands, all tell much the same story. Women are not more frequent as dedicators in the first half of the second century than they were in the fifth century. The only significant differences occur between various dedication-records of temples: thus the old dedications that were repaired or replaced in Oropus around 240 had been given by almost as many women as men,''? while those included in an inventory of the second century were almost all the gifts of men.''* In view of the uniformity of the record in other sources, I think we must attribute this and similar phenomena simply to a difference in the kind of dedications represented. An inventory including, for example, annual priestly dedications, will naturally show a heavy male bias. It has been suggested that the dedication of an object to a divinity did not require the approval of a kyrios in places where other acts did.’ Most of our inscriptions do not help us in this question, for they record the source of the object (‘so-and-so dedicated’) rather than the transaction by which it left the owner’s hands. The manumission-inscriptions, most of which are written in the form of a dedication of the slave to a divinity, are no help: it is not clear, for one thing, whether their legal status is the same as that of a true dedication, and they show a sufficiently marked geographical variation for us to have to explain both sides of the issue — once we know why a kyrios is not required for a Delphic manumission, we must establish why he is required for a Boeotian one. The few inscriptions that do describe transactions do not, however, support the theory that they took place without kyrioi. The women who contribute to the fund for renewing the clothes and vessels of an image in Lindus do so with the agreement of their Kyrioi.''® Nicesarete, a

Exchange and Disposition 73 woman of Amorgos, dedicates land with the agreement of her kyrios''’— not surprisingly, since the land is in fact his, mortgaged for her dowry; the will of Epicteta, whose purpose is the establishment of a religious foundation, is agreed to by her kyrios.''® There are two exceptions, one from the Megarid!!? and one from Calauria in the Peloponnese; '?° but these are not sufficient to be used as examples for a general rule, and they may either be due to the omission of the kyrios by the stonecutter or to a difference in the laws of these localities, for in neither is the presence (or absence) of a kyrios attested for any other transaction. How are we to explain the great frequency of women’s dedications? Even were we to accept the theory outlined in the last paragraph, it would not help us, for the requirement of consent of the kyrios, as we have seen, was not what prevented women from entering other transactions. But it is clear that the major factor which did keep women from large-scale economic activity, namely, the division of functions between male and female, was not a factor here. Religion in Greece was never a male monopoly — it was, on the contrary, just about the only institution of Greek society that was suffused with women from the top to the bottom, from the priestesses and prophetesses to Sostratus’ mother, who ‘goes in circles around the whole deme, sacrificing’.'*' For a woman to appear too often in the market might be demeaning; for her to appear at religious functions was not. Buying, selling, and lending she might do within limits, for those were essentially her husband’s job; dedicating and sacrificing were the business of both husband and wife. For this reason we do not find an increase in the frequency of women’s dedications in the Hellenistic period. Already before that time, dedication was, like other religious acts, an essential part of the woman’s role. One word of caution is in order: there is no reason to presume that the property dedicated by women had originally been theirs. The very community of property between husband and wife which, legalized in the concept of family property, generally resulted in the husband’s controlling the wife’s resources, might here work in the opposite direction. The person who is mentioned as the dedicator of an object is not necessarily the person who provided the money, but the person who incurred the obligation to the divinity: when a woman in labour vows a statue, she may have to get the money for it from her husband, but the statue will bear the woman’s name.'”” So the dedications, while they do indicate that women could incur obligations concerning large sums of money, do not necessarily mean that the money was theirs for other purposes. A man who might think twice about refusing money vowed to a divinity could still be firm in refusing new clothes to his wife.

6

The Dowry Marriage in Athens was a contract between the bride’s father and the groom. The form of the marriage was a conditional gift: PATAECUS. I give you this woman for the procreation of legitimate children. POLEMON. I accept. PATAECUS. And three talents’ dowry. POLEMON. And all is well.’ Traces of a similar concept survive in the Christian wedding ceremony: the father brings the bride to the altar and gives her to the groom. At Athens, however, the gift of the bride was no empty formality, but a reflection of the actual state of affairs. The bride herself could not legally enter into the contract; only if she was given away by the appropriate man was the marriage valid and the issue legitimate.” Scattered throughout the literature we find mention of the considerations that go into — or that should go into — the choice of a bride,’ or the choice of a son-in-law.* No one discusses the choice of a husband, since that was not the woman’s prerogative. Arranging this marriage was the primary responsibility of the family into which a woman was born. This responsibility fell in the first instance upon the head of the family — the father, if he was living; otherwise a paternal brother or, failing those, the paternal grandfather® — and we have already seen the seriousness with which it was taken. Along with the wedding, indeed, almost essential to it, went the responsibility of providing a dowry; and this was a matter that determined more than any other what the woman’s economic status would be in her new family. The dowry at A thens.° Just as marriage, ideally, dominated the social life of an Athenian woman, so the dowry, ideally, dominated her economic affairs. Both ideals were truest among the upper classes. The dowries mentioned in the orators vary from ten to fifty minae, while property actually belonging to the women mentioned was, as we have already seen, very slight.’ Among women of this class, the dowry represented more money than they were likely to control in their entire life, and it was able to serve them in ways that their personal possessions could not. The first purpose served by the dowry was the attraction of a suitable husband. It is doubtful whether Athenian girls really grew up without ever seeing the light of day, but it is certain that girls of good family did not mix freely with men, and were unlikely to attract a husband by their personal merits. A girl’s family might be an asset: the speaker of

The Dowry 75

Lysias 19 claims that he and his father chose their wives because they were daughters of worthy men,° and an orator with a case at hand might even claim that no man would turn down a true friend’s daughter.’ But in the absence of a friend both true and generous, the dowry was an important matter. A woman without a dowry was in danger of being unmarried all her life, as litigants with daughters did not fail to remind the court: ‘For who would ever take a dowerless wife from a penniless man in debt to the state?’ ’° A large dowry, on the other hand, might attract an otherwise unattainable husband. It was a sign of Callias’ wealth, not merely his consideration, that he was able to offer his daughters any bridegroom they wanted,'’ and the younger Alcibiades claimed that his maternal grandfather’s wealth had made all the best youth of Greece suitors for his mother’s hand.'* Isaeus in two places implies that it would be extraordinary for a wealthy groom to accept a dowerless wife, or one with a small dowry;'* this is, of course, Isaeus speaking, but there can be little doubt that there was a tendency for wealthy men to receive large dowries. The only legal obligation that the groom acquired toward the wife upon receipt of the dowry was her maintenance, for which he was responsible as long as he held it. During the marriage this ‘obligation’ cannot have meant very much, since it was the normal duty of a man to feed his wife and all the other members of his household; in practice it meant that in case of divorce, or in case the marriage failed to take place (as that of Aphobus and Demosthenes’ mother),'* the wife’s kyrios could sue the husband to pay for her upkeep out of the interest

on the dowry, computed at the rate of 18 per cent.'> In effect, then, this obligation was essentially a matter between the husband and the woman’s kyrios: a matter that might work to the wife’s disadvantage, if she was caught in the middle of a struggle about who should be feeding her.

Ownership and control. The dowry itself belonged in no legal sense to the woman. She could not dispose of it, since it was worth more than a medimnus of barley. Its management belonged, as did the management of the property she brought with her, to her husband.'® Her husband, on the other hand, could dispose of it freely, even too freely: Menander’s Epitrepontes shows us an old man hurrying to obtain his daughter’s divorce before her dowry is spent.'’ It could be confiscated for the husband’s debt.'® The only legal restrictions on the husband’s rights were the claims of the woman’s kyrios in case of divorce, childless death, or state confiscation of the husband’s property.’?

This being the case, it is strange to see the dowry being referred to | regularly as if it were the woman’s. The wife of one debtor begged the creditors not to touch the furniture, which was part of her dowry: ‘leave

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 76 the furniture’, she cried, ‘and don’t take anything of mine’.*? Mantitheus tried to demonstrate that his mother had a dowry, for her brothers were rich and unlikely ‘to rob their own sister’;’' Demosthenes, speaking in his own person, called the dowry ‘hers’ (ta ekeinés).*” This surely does not reflect a division of use; there is no evidence I know of to indicate that women were ever likely to manage their own dowries as they managed household expenses.” It reflects a much broader power, through which a well-dowered wife could dominate the economic life of the family. Menander warns against marrying a woman whose dowry is out of proportion to one’s own wealth: ‘When a man who is poor chooses to marry and accepts the property that comes along with the wife, he is giving himself, not taking her’,’* and Plutarch says the same: ‘Those who marry women far above themselves become without realizing it their dowries’ slaves, not their wives’ husbands’.*> Similar sentiments may lie behind a fragment of Euripides, “Even though free, he is a slave of his marriage bed, having sold his body for his dowry’.”° These are not isolated statements,”’ nor are they bits of romantic advice against marrying for money. They are warnings against a phenomenon that was very real to the Athenians, even if it had no legal basis. How did a man become a slave to his dowry? The wife had one clear source of practical power: if she chose to divorce her husband, he had to return the dowry to her kyrios — a procedure which might be impossible if he had spent it, and would in any event be disagreeable if his personal estate was not worth much more than the dowry.”* There must have been men at Athens who, after some profligate or unsuccessful years, possessed less money than they had received as a dowry; such men could avoid bankruptcy only by keeping the favour of their wives, and there is little doubt that they would be considered ‘their dowries’ slaves’. But not all slaves are slaves to power or to threats, nor did all wives have to be ready to divorce their husbands to get their way. The Athenians considered the dowry to be the wife’s contribution to the family treasury, and the wife who contributed more than her husband had a good claim to be considered the senior partner. This appears most clearly when Xenophon’s hero Ischomachus finds it necessary to persuade his wife otherwise: ‘For I am laying out everything I own into our common treasury, and you have deposited everything you brought into our common treasury. And we shouldn’t calculate which of us has contributed more; instead, we should recognize clearly that whichever of us should be the better partner — that one is contributing the item of greatest value.’*? The moral obligation under which a man was put when he accepted a large dowry made Gorgias in the Dyscolus hesitate about his marriage: (GORGIAS.) My sister I give to you for a wife, and as for taking yours — I’m all right. (SOSTRATUS.) What do you mean, “all right’?

The Dowry 77

(GO.) It doesn’t seem pleasant to me to live high off other people’s. efforts. I'd rather save up my own money. (SO.) You’re talking nonsense, Gorgias; don’t you think you’re worthy of the match? (GO.) I think I’m worthy of her, but I don’t think it’s worthy for a man with a little to take a lot.*° Once married, he might find himself the object of considerable scorn if he failed to support his wife as her dowry deserved. Theophrastus’ badmouth, the kakologos, chooses this fault for one of his tidbits: ‘and stinginess — there’s nothing like it. To give you an idea: his wife brought him a talent’s dowry, and bore him a son, and he gives her three coppers for treats, and forces her to wash in cold water on New Year’s day.’ >? Not everybody was daunted by moral obligation or public scorn. Menander presents a character who seems able to overcome his better feelings: ‘He got a dowry of four talents of silver, but he doesn’t consider himself his wife’s servant; he sleeps away from home, and pays a pimp twelve drachmas a day’.*? Against behaviour like this there is, should tears and protests fail, no defence except divorce. The girl’s father attempts to effect a divorce,’ but the girl herself objects.°* What is to be learned from this? Only that Athenian women were liable, like the rest of us, to love their spouses, and that for a couple to break up was a difficult emotional matter then as now. Obvious as such a statement is, it is nevertheless worth keeping in mind when speaking of divorce as a remedy to

a woman’s problems: the sickness might have become quite serious | before a wife would take the remedy. One woman who tried it was Alcibiades’ wife Hipparete, whose

troubles were documented in gory detail by Pseudo-Andocides: ‘After , getting a dowry bigger than any Greek ever got,*° he had the nerve to bring prostitutes, both slave and free, into the same house, until he forced his wife, a perfectly modest woman, to go to the archon, to divorce him according to the law. And that was where he really showed his power: he called together his cronies, snatched the woman out of the agora, took her away forcibly, and showed everybody what contempt he had for the archons and the laws and the other citizens’.°° The story is a very sad one; Plutarch adds that the woman did not live long thereafter.°” But there cannot have been many such stories. Few Athenians could have got away with what Alcibiades could; and even Alcibiades had to collect a gang for the purpose. Normally a wife, once she had decided to leave her husband, must have been able to count on the support and protection of her family.

The dowry and economic class. Among the lower economic strata, dow: ries were of course lower. Most of the preserved horoi deal with dowries of twenty minae or less, and these are still the dowries of people with real property.” It is conceivable that the dowry disappeared entirely in

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 78 the lowest citizen classes; there are certainly dowerless women in the orators,°” and even the smallest dowries on the horoi were well beyond the reach of the poorest citizens of Athens.”° We should nevertheless be wary of presuming that there was a proportional relationship between a father’s wealth and the dowry he gave to his daughter. The evidence we have on the subject is meagre, but it does not support such an assumption. Ciron, a man whose fortune amounted to somewhat more than a talent and a half,*’ gave his daughter a dowry of twenty-five minae; when he failed to recover the full amount at his son-in-law’s death, he gave her away a second time with ten minae.” Endius, who possessed three talents, was alleged to have given the daughter of his adoptive father ten minae; the speaker of Isaeus 3 claims that no adopted son would dare give a legitimate daughter less than a tenth of the estate. ** Onetor, on the other hand, possessing more than thirty talents, gave a dowry of either a talent or eighty minae, but Demosthenes gives no indication that this was a parsimonious sum.” At the other end of the scale, Demosthenes’ father gave his daughter two talents out of. fourteen, his wife eighty minae; but these were testamentary bequests, and the sum for the daughter must have included the wherewithal to maintain her for ten years, until she was of marriageable age. Diodotus’ will provided a talent apiece for his daughter and his wife, out of an estate that appears to have amounted to somewhat more than thirteen talents.*° Pasio left his wife five talents, some three talents and forty

minae of which were, probably, all that was technically her dowry; out of a total worth of some sixty talents,*® this was still somewhat less than a tenth. These dowries are all from wealthy people; but they show a wide varlation in percentage of the giver’s estate, from almost twenty per cent in the case of Ciron*? (estimating his total fortune to have been slightly more than two talents) to less than five per cent for Onetor. In actual monetary value, on the other hand, we saw a rather smaller range of sums.°° This should not surprise us; surely there were other factors that affected the size of the dowry besides the fortune of the man who gave it. Aman with many daughters must have given each a smaller sum than aman of similar fortune with only one daughter;”' and since the major purpose of the dowry was to attract a husband, the sums will have depended in part upon the competition. Even if Onetor had had three hundred talents, there would have been little need for him to settle more than a single talent on his daughter; an amount on that order put her among the most attractive matches an Athenian could make. The family of Callias, who seem to have been more generous, were clearly using dowries as a form of ostentation.**

Dowries of the poor. At the other end of the economic scale, we may

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suspect that dowries represented a much greater proportion of the family’s wealth. The poor of Athens were not in direct competition with the Onetors and the Hipponici; but they, too, must have found it difficult to get a bridegroom if they had no money to offer, and it was a matter of pride to offer as much as they could, or more. That citizens of Myconos offered dowries above their ability to pay is epigraphically attested,>? and it is reasonable to believe that the same was true at Athens. Menander’s Gorgias, a pauper who has just been given half a farm, has to be talked out of giving his sister a talent’s dowry,“ and the entire plot of Plautus’ Trinummus revolves around a man who feels honour-bound to dower a girl for whom he is responsible, even though her suitor is willing to accept her dowerless. The dowry, in Athens, was a necessity; and like necessities at all places and at all times, it must have taken up a greater part of the budgets of the poor than those of the rich. The strain placed on the poor by the competition for bridegrooms may have been behind the Solonian legislation against dowries.°° Wealthy people, as we see from the orators, usually did not include the wife’s trousseau in the evaluation of the dowry. She brought her clothing with her without legally binding her husband to return it in case of divorce; he, for his part, was likely to return it anyway. This was not a matter of law, but of politeness; legally anything could be valued in the dowry, as long as it was actually delivered to the groom’s household.>® Among the lower classes, this conventional generosity is less likely to have obtained. A man who was hard-pressed to provide a dowry might well have preferred to inflate the figure by including his daughter’s trousseau; he may also have been more careful to make sure that everything he gave would be returned in case of divorce. Our only direct evidence for this practice among the poor comes not from Athens, but from the dowry-inscription of Myconos, where three dowries specifically mention that clothing (esthés) was included in the sum: it is precisely these three whose cash balances are not paid in full.°’ In Athens such a practice was certainly legal; but in the absence of evidence about poor women’s dowries, we cannot be certain that it was common, or indeed that it was found at all in ordinary cases. To what extent the poor of Athens were able to dower their daughters, however, depended not only upon their own fortunes, but upon the fortunes and the generosity of their friends and relatives. It was considered a deed of piety to provide dowries for poor relatives, and we have numerous testimonies of such benefactions. Thus the speaker of Lysias 19, after describing his father’s liturgies, adds, ‘and furthermore, he also helped some of the impoverished citizens give away their daughters and sisters, at his own expense’,”® an act which he classes with the ransoming of prisoners and providing money for funeral expenses. Aristomenes appears to have performed a similar favour for the mother of the speaker

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 8&0 of Isaeus 10, although the speaker, in his eagerness to gain his grandfather’s property, from which the encumbrances have now been removed, maintains this to have been part of a plot against him.°? Chaerestratus in the Aspis, ‘since he is a good man’,™ is ready to dower his niece when her brother fails to return from battle. A letter attributed to Plato discusses his responsibility for dowering his grandnieces: “My friends and I have to give in marriage any of these women who marry in my lifetime; it will be too bad about those who marry later. I don’t have to give away any whose fathers are richer than I; but now I am the wealthiest of them, and I even gave away their mothers, along with Dion and others’; here we see the members of a family taking collective responsibility for raising their daughters’ dowries. Particularly noble, according to Demosthenes, was the example of Satyrus the comic actor, who came to Philip after the fall of Olynthus and requested him to free the captive daughters of

one of Satyrus’ xenoi, so that Satyrus could give them away with dowries. We see here the extent to which one might go to see to it that a friend’s daughters suffered ‘nothing unworthy either of ourselves or of their father’; even a man of ordinary decency might be expected to take a similar interest in a brother’s family. Attacks on men who failed to do so are preserved for us by the orators.” The most famous beneficiaries of dowry-assistance were the daughters of Aristeides, who were said to have been dowered by the state; it is worth noting, perhaps, that their dowry was less than a third of the cash grant to their brother, who also got one hundred plethra of land and four times his sisters’ living allowance. Probably the oddest such case was Neaera’s alleged daughter Phano. Epaenetus, caught with Phano in what Stephanus claimed was adultery (the term, in Greece, included offences with the plaintiff's daughter as well as his wife), paid a ransom for his freedom, then charged Stephanus with having framed him. The dispute was settled on the following terms: ‘What happened concerning the imprisonment (i.e., Stephanus’ holding of Epaenetus for ransom) is to be completely forgotten, and Epaenetus is to give Phano a thousand drachmas towards her wedding, since he has slept with her often. Stephanus is to make Phano available to Epaenetus whenever he is in town and wishes to have relations with her.’™ Here the lover not only contributed to the girl’s hope-chest, but did so on condition of her continued favours! In reality, of course, no true marriage was contemplated by such provisions. Phano remained — or became — a hetaera, like her alleged mother; the ransom was said to be ‘towards her wedding’ (eis. ekdosin) in order to make Stephanus’ acceptance of it on behalf of a girl he claimed as his daughter more respectable; and the last clause, ensuring Epaenetus of her ‘availability’, was added to protect him against a second charge of adultery.°’ The examples quoted are not from lower-class people, except for

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Phano, who had connections; they are dealing for the most part with well-to-do Athenians, who, having fallen on hard times, were helped out by their families. Whether or not a chronically poor man was likely to have rich relatives to whom he could turn for help is a much harder question to solve, and one that goes beyond the limits of the present study. All we can say is that if a man could get financial assistance, it is likely to have been most available, and most welcome, for the dowering of his daughters. The dowry after marriage. The protection afforded a woman by her dowry did not cease when she was divorced or when her husband died. As long as the money was in the hands of her former husband or his heirs, she was entitled to maintenance from the interest. In the case of a woman who returned to her former household, this may have been a a matter that affected her only indirectly; her brother (or, indeed, any member of her family) was not likely to let her starve while waiting for the dowry to be returned,®® and the suit would affect her only in so far as it would enable (and at least morally, obligate) him to maintain her on a higher level. A woman who had children at her husband’s death, or who claimed to be pregnant, was entitled to remain in her husband’s household.® If the children were adults, they became her kyrioi and were responsible for her maintenance; if they were minors, she was apparently maintained out of their estate. This seems, at least, to have been the situation with the mother of Demosthenes, since it was Demosthenes who, as heir of the estate, demanded from Aphobus the reimbursement for maintenance which Aphobus owed.” The pregnant mother remained under the protection of the archon”’ until the birth of the child; thereupon a guardian was presumably appointed, who would also be the woman’s kyrios. Once the dowry either returned to the kyrios or passed to the sons, its legal existence seems to have been at an end. The responsibility of the sons for their mother’s maintenance was independent of her dowry, and the responsibility of her Kyrios does not seem to have differed from his responsibility before the marriage — that is to say, it was a matter of family ties rather than legal responsibilities. If the woman was still marriageable, it was the duty of the kyrios to marry her off again. This responsibility was not perhaps as pressing as the marriage of a virgin, at least if the woman had children; thus Demosthenes, as often as he upbraids Aphobus for not marrying Demosthenes’ mother, does it from a financial point of view (‘He neither returned (the dowry) itself nor paid her maintenance-allowance’).’* He uses very different language when speaking of his sister: “Nor did they feel shame — if not pity — that my sister, who had been deemed worthy of two talents by my father, was to get none of the things that were proper;

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 82 but as if they had been some sort of enemies, rather than friends and bereaved relatives, they paid no attention at all to their family ties.’ ” But if the matter was not an emergency, it seems to have been taken seriously enough by Athenian men, and there are numerous attested cases of women married for a second time; some, in fact, never returned to their fathers’ houses, but were betrothed by their dying husbands, along with dowries at least as large as those they had brought with them.’> Once a woman had returned to her family, she still required a dowry for a second wedding, and while it was legal, and not unexampled, to give the second husband a smaller amount than the first, it was clearly the feeling of Athenian men that such behaviour required a good excuse. The speaker of Isaeus 8 feels compelled to offer such an excuse: “My grandfather received her back, and since he did not recover as large a dowry as he had given — because of the impoverished state of Nausimenes’ affairs — he gave her away again to my father, and gave a dowry of a thousand drachmas along with her’,’° as opposed to the twenty-five minae which her first husband had received. And Mantitheus professes disbelief at the suggestion that well-to-do Athenians would have done such a thing: “Nor is it likely that Menexenus and Bathyllus, who had a lot of money themselves, and who had recovered the dowry at Cleomedon’s death, would rob their own sister’.’’? Phaenippus went so far as to list his mother’s dowry among his debts.”® It is not easy to see what he had in mind — whether he considered the money a debt to her, in that he was obliged to find another husband for her, or whether his father was still alive but retired, and he considered the dowry a debt to her former Kyrios, to whom he could be obliged to repay it if his mother should return to her family’s house after his father’s death or a divorce’? — but neither possibility, in the case of a woman whose son was grown and in charge of the oikos, would offer much justification for him. An inscription of the poletai, on the other hand, distinguishes the land of the widow — apparently land that had been mortgaged against her dowry — from the land of her husband’s heirs;°’ so the claim might have been credible in another situation. Whether or not there were circumstances in which the dowry did not have to be returned to the wife’s kyrios is a question over which scholars have been able to exercise their wits, since there is no direct evidence. Only two cases suggest themselves: (a) that of a foreign woman betrothed to an Athenian citizen by another citizen “who claimed that she belonged to him’ (hds heautoi prosékousan)*' and (b) adultery. In the first case, the law itself should satisfy us that the dowry was not returnable, for the kyrios who had married the girl off with such a claim lost his civic rights and had his property expropriated;°? it hardly seems likely that he could then go to the husband whom he had tricked and demand his money back. He surely had no recourse at law, being deprived of civic

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rights.®° It is equally dubious whether his sons could inherit his claim to the dowry, should he have died between the marriage and the divorce; rather than come to court with the information that their father should have lost his citizenship and his property, they were probably well advised to leave the matter alone. In the case of adultery, we are not helped much even by indirect evidence. At Ephesus, adultery on the part of the wife forfeited the dowry;™ but Ephesus was not Athens. An attempt was at one time made to show that Plango, the wife of Mantias, had never received her dowry back because she had been divorced on the grounds of adultery; but the argument, which was ex silentio in the first place, has been well disposed of by Wolff.8> Beauchet argued that ‘since the return of the dowry ordinarily operates to the profit of the person who had given it, it is impossible for the giver to suffer from a fault which is foreign to him’;®° but this is an argument which can be turned around with equal force: why should the husband (who is required to divorce his wife, and may have some difficulty returning the dowry) suffer for a crime that is not only not his, but has in fact been committed against him? If indeed the cuckold was required to return the dowry with the wife, then the Athenian courts were offering good reason for him to remain silent and go along, in spite of the laws, with his wife’s adultery. There is no proof that they did not do so, but it is hard to imagine.°’ In the Athenian courts, where precedent had no legal standing, anything that was not explicitly and unambiguously stated in a written law was open to argument.®* The jurors were sworn to uphold the law, and they apparently took their oath seriously; but in the absence of precedent, consistently applied interpretations — what we like to call ‘the letter of the law’, as if every law had only one possible correct interpretation — counted for much less than emotional appeal and ostensible moral rectitude. The Attic Orator, retained by a cuckold who wished to keep his dowry, would be likely to write him a speech emphasizing the grievous injury to the husband, the unspeakable avarice of the kyrios who wished to profit from his daughter’s (sister’s, niece’s) crime, the danger to the state and to public morals when well-dowered wives would be able to practise adultery with impunity. If Demosthenes’ estimation of his audience was anywhere near correct, any one of these arguments would carry more weight with them than finely-drawn legalisms. And the law, in Athens. was what the jurors thought it was.*?

Old age. If a woman had borne sons, she was entitled to be supported by them in her old age, as was their father. Her children had to provide her with lodging and food,” and could be prosecuted by any citizen for

abusing her.”' She was under the particular protection of the archon or, ,

if she was a metic, of the polemarch.”” According to a law quoted by

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece S84 Aeschines, it was forbidden for anyone to speak in the assembly “who strikes his father or his mother, or fails to provide them with food or lodging’,”> and he accuses Timarchus of violating the law by wasting the property from which he could feed (and on which he could bury) his

mother.”

Legally, then, a woman was never as thoroughly protected as she was in her old age. In fact, the care with which parents are treated by the laws testifies to their actual powerlessness once they had retired from their property and left it in the hands of their children. The protection of the archon was extended also to orphans, epikleroi, and pregnant widows remaining in their husbands’ houses; to all those, in short, who were easily abused by the members of their oikoi. Aeschines’ description of Timarchus’ mother, ‘begging and pleading’ (hiketeuousés kai antibolousés) for him not to sell the land, shows the situation in its pathetic aspect; the aged Philocleon’s tipsy complaint to the flute-girl, ‘Now I don’t have control of my own property, because I’m young, and very closely guarded. My son watches me carefully, and he’s grouchy, and besides, he’s a cumin-splitting-cardamum-scraping skinflint. He worries about me, afraid that I’ll waste all the property, since he doesn’t have any father except me’,” shows behind its comedy the same childlike dependence of the parent on the child. Abuse of one’s parents was considered to be a particularly heinous offence, and we must presume that the normal Athenian treated his mother and father, as have most peoples, with a good deal more reverence than is customary today; the laws were intended to chastise the exceptions. How common the exceptions were, and to what extent they were indeed restrained by the law, goes beyond the limits of our study; for us it will suffice to point out _ that a woman’s rights to maintenance continued throughout her life, if she had sons, and included the right to burial and maintenance of cult at her grave after death.”° As for the childless woman, she presumably remained in the house of her kyrios. She had no legal claim to maintenance from her relatives,”’ and was dependent upon their willingness, and ability, to keep her. Much can be surmised about the life of such women, but nothing is known. The dowry outside of Athens. We have concerned ourselves thus far only with Athens. Most of our evidence has come from literary sources, chiefly from the orators; for the rest of Greece, where literary evidence is scanty, much less can be said. We have no grounds to infer that the laws, customs, or social functions of the dowry were identical throughout Greece, or even that they were anywhere quite what they were at Athens; and only in isolated cases have we any grounds to deny it. There is only one general principle that we can state, and it is based on inference rather than evidence: namely, that where women were more directly

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involved in economic affairs — as they were, on the evidence of the preceding chapters, in many places in Greece — the dowry is unlikely to have dominated their economic life as thoroughly as it did at Athens. In Delos, where the women seem not to have dealt much directly with property until the second century, there is reason to suspect that as they became more actively involved, they acquired more control over their dowries. This, at any rate, is what seems to be implied by the sudden increase in the number of loans that are ‘agreed to’ by the wives of the borrowers. We find in the inscriptions dated 200 or earlier forty-two new loans contracted by men: one records the agreement of a man,” two the agreement of the borrower’s wife,”’ and one that of two people of whom the first is illegible and the second is a wife — whether of the borrower or of the other consentor is not clear.'” Of thirty-five new loans to men in the second century, twelve are agreed to by the borrower’s wife,'°' one by his mother,’®? and one by a woman whose relationship cannot be determined.'®? The change is noteworthy, but its explanation is only conjectural. I suspect that at this period Delian women were coming to be considered the owners of their dowries, so that their agreement was required (or desired) before real estate that was mortgaged for a dowry (or that formed part of a dowry, if that was customary at Delos) could be used as security for a loan. The simultaneous increase in female debtors may point in the same direction, for control of her dowry will have given a woman real security on which to borrow. The Amorgian horoi seem to indicate the same development. One of them records that the owner of the lands has hypothecated them with his wife’s agreement (synepichdrousés tés gynaikos),'™ and another records a prasis epi lysei by a husband and wife of lands that were all originally acquired by the husband;'® in both cases, we must presume that the woman’s agreement was necessary because the land, although belonging (at least in the second case) to the husband, was mortgaged for her dowry. Our presumption is strengthened by the fact that in both stones the woman agrees with a kyrios other than her husband. He was presumably her original Kyrios, to whom the land was legally obligated, and whose consent was thus desired before more encumbrances could be placed on it. Most striking is the horos that records Nicesarete’s dedication of real estate assessed in her dowry (apotetimémenon. . . eis tén protka),'°° a dedication which is performed, indeed, with her husband’s consent (though not with that of her former kyrios), but which certainly shows a much more direct use of the dowry than was possible for an | Athenian woman. At Gortyn, according to Wolff,'°’ there was no proix, and indeed there was not, in the sense in which Wolff uses the word, that is, the

dowry as it existed at Athens. But there was a dowry at Gortyn. Much |

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 86 of the legalism surrounding the Athenian dowry was absent, for a woman of Gortyn could own property, and was entitled at the end of the marriage to ‘her own property . . . which she had had at the time of the marriage’, as well as part of the produce of her married life;'® at her death, her children inherited her property.’®’ This being so, the purposes of the dowry required no more than a gift to the woman at her marriage; but such gifts were certainly given, and probably no less regularly than at Athens. The Code refers to them with the provision, ‘If the father should wish during his lifetime to give to his daughter upon her marriage, he is to give as prescribed, but no more. Anyone to whom he has already given or pledged is to have that, but she is not to inherit anything more (of the paternal property)’.''° This legislation, restricting the size of the dowry to the girl’s share of the inheritance (i.e., to half a son’s share), seems to imply in its last phrase the existence of even larger dowries before the introduction of the law. A further requirement was the witnessing of the dowry: “When the property is divided, three or more adult free witnesses are to be present. If he should give to a daughter, the same applies’.''’ The presence of witnesses was common, but not

| required, at Athens.'’”

The connection of estate division with gifts to the daughter is not fortuitous, for a woman’s dowry in Gortyn was her share of the estate. Upon receipt of a dowry from her father, she lost her claim on the estate; '’° after the estate had been divided, she had her marriage-portion and could expect no dowry from her brothers.'* It is unlikely, however, that most women had to wait for their father’s death before receiving their share. The possibility of a gift ‘to his daughter upon her marriage’ during his lifetime was, as we have seen, considered by the Code (gifts to sons were not), and a girl who received nothing from her father would have been at a disadvantage in competition with fatherless girls who had already received their inheritances. Ephorus, apparently describing the situation that we find in Gortyn, considered the daughter’s share to be her dowry: ‘The dowry, if there are brothers, is half of a brother’s portion’.''> He was not misunderstanding the situation; the dowry and the inheritance were in fact identical. If the money was given at the wedding by the father, we should call it a dowry; if it was received at the father’s death, an inheritance; but its function in the woman’s life was the same in either case. Both the origin of the woman’s special inheritance rights — an anomaly in Greek law, where women did not generally inherit anything at all in the presence of equally close males — and the restriction of those rights to daughters (sisters of the deceased would not inherit anything if there were brothers) are to be explained as a procedure to

guarantee (and, at least by the time of the Code, to limit) a woman’s : dowry, not as a survival of a hypothetical proto-Cretan matriarchy. The fact that a daughter’s inheritance was simply her dowry under

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another guise will also explain to us the peculiar restriction of the inheritance law, whereby certain forms of property, including the townhouse, were divided among the sons only, even if there were daughters in the house.'!® These items were the essentials of the inheritance: a man did not give his daughter his family home as a dowry, and the law did not legislate such a gift at his death. After the sons, who were the true heirs, had divided the items that were the essentials of the estate, the law set aside one-half of a brother’s portion out of the remainder to take the place of the dowry the daughter would have received from her father had he survived. Since the dowry (or inheritance) of a Gortynian woman was her personal property, it naturally followed her in case of divorce, or of her husband’s death; upon her death it passed to her children. As regards her membership in a family, the rules were apparently the same as those at Athens: if her husband died childless, the woman left his household; if there were children, she was permitted to do so, whence we may gather that she could also remain.'’’ If she does leave, she may go with a gift from her husband: ‘she is to marry, taking her own property and whatever her husband may give according to the law before three adult free witnesses’.''® This gift is given, like the dowry, in the presence of three witnesses and is not considered by the Code in the case of divorce: '!” it is precisely the phenomenon we have observed at Athens of a husband dowering his wife on his deathbed. At Athens, testamentary dowries seem generally to have been larger than those arranged by living fathers for their daughters,'*° and the only case in which we can compare a woman’s first dowry to that granted by her dying husband shows the latter to have been substantially larger.'?’ In Gortyn, where the woman possessed her original dowry automatically, provision was made for her husband on his deathbed to increase the sum. Both at Athens and at Gortyn, the purpose of the gift must have been to make the widow more attractive to a prospective husband, and to ensure that the marriage actually took place once the husband was not there to arrange it. In a later provision, these gifts were restricted to a hundred staters; so were gifts by a son to his mother, which presumably would also be given for

her remarriage.'?? ,

The law of Gortyn expresses itself in different terms from that of Athens, and has certain very considerable differences in substance. But the differences of expression should not blind us to similarities where they exist. The Code describes gifts given to daughters at their marriage, duly witnessed, which follow the wife when she leaves the household, which pass to her children at her death, which are in need of sumptuary legislation to restrict their size, and which may be increased by a husband on his deathbed. Ephorus called them phernae. Would another Greek have called them proikes?'*? We don’t know; but it is clear that

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece &8 we are dealing with an institution very closely related to the Athenian dowry. The chief differences between the Athenian dowry and the Gortynian were three. Most notable is that the Gortynian dowry was considered to belong to the woman, not to her kKyrios, and could not be alienated by anyone but her.’2* The second important difference is that the dowry of the Gortynian woman belonged to her of right, as part of the law of inheritance, whereas an Athenian man was under no legal compulsion whatsoever to dower his daughters.’ Even in Gortyn, the father was not obliged to furnish a dowry at the time of the marriage; but the bride was nevertheless assured of her eventual share. The third difference is not — at least in origin, for the Code is clearly interested in curbing dowries, not raising them’?° — a legal difference but a social one: in no case that we know of at Athens did the daughter receive as much as half a brother’s portion of the estate. Here, however, we should not express ourselves with too much certainty, for our Athenian information comes from the upper classes where the dowry was likely to form a smaller part of the estate than elsewhere. Even less is known about Sparta, and what we do know is obscured by various idealized tales about the ‘Lycurgan constitution’. But it is clear from Aristotle that dowries were given in his day, and he considered the practice one of the causes of Sparta’s weakness: ‘and almost twofifths of all the land belongs to women, both because there are many epikleroi, and because they give large dowries’.'*’ The statement is an interesting one, since in Athens a woman did not own her dowry, nor was an epikleros full mistress of her patrimony; no matter how large the dowries, or the number of epikleroi, Athens would not have belonged to the women. We might suspect that Aristotle was merely using his terminology loosely, as the Athenians did when speaking of dowries; but our other evidence seems to support the conclusion that Spartan women were indeed possessors of wealth in their own right. The example of Cynisca has been mentioned, of whom Xenophon says that she showed with her victory ‘that this creature (the horse) is an indication not of manly virtue (andragathia), but of wealth’;'*® we may add the mother and grandmother of Agis IV, who was, according to Plutarch, the wealthiest of all the Lacedaemonians — indeed, it is the wealth of the Spartan women that he cites as having been one of the great obstacles to Agis’ reforms.'*? If Aristotle could attribute such wealth to the size of Spartan dowries, we must conclude that women at Sparta, as women at Gortyn,'*? owned their dowries; and while we have no information as to the actual power of Gortynian wives, it is clear that the women of Lacedaemon were the mistresses of their property.

7

Patterns in Women’s Economics What does it all mean? We have a series of still photographs from different places and different times, and the patterns that seem to arise are, as I said in the introduction, subject to differing interpretations. I have tried throughout to give facts precedence over theory, for the more of ourselves we project into history, the less we can understand the ancients, whether good or bad, and the less we can learn from them; but nothing has been learned at all unless we examine the patterns that do emerge from the evidence. These patterns do not, in the case at hand, completely fit what was to be expected (what, indeed, 1 myself had expected) on the basis of received opinion. I can only state the truth as it appears in the field of this study, and leave it to others to see whether or not the

same patterns apply to other areas of Greek society. | Greek society and Greek law. A person who has read the Athenian orators and comes to deal with the law of Gortyn is likely to feel himself in another world. There are tribes and serfs, and government seems to rotate among families, rather than individuals; women marry ‘whomever they please’, inherit half a brother’s portion from their father’s estate, and hold their property in their own name. The reader who was expecting something like Athenian law might think he was dealing with a document of another society entirely, and indeed, some venturesome scholars have attempted to explain Gortynian society as if it were closer to the Iroquois or the Alamanni than the Athenians. It is surprising, then, to see how closely the institutions of Athenian society are paralleled in Gortyn. In Gortyn, as in Athens, there is an oikos, and a man is its head, despite the law’s abolition of his economic powers. Women marry when they are of age, and are given a dowry when they do; if their fathers are dead, their brothers once provided the dowry as in Athens, but now the women can claim it of right. When they are divorced, or when their husbands die without children, they return to their former oikos, and take their dowries with them. During their marriage they occupy themselves with ‘weaving within the household’. Their inheritance rights, except for the special provision guaranteeing a daughter’s dowry, are parallel to those of the Athenian woman: this indicates strongly that family structure, too, was similar, that is, that the Gortynians had the same ideas as the Athenians as to who was a near relative and who was a distant one. It is perhaps most striking to find the insti-

_ Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 90 tution of the epikleros, under a different name, indeed, and with differences of detail, but quite recognizably the same institution that in Athens appeared to serve purposes that had no place at Gortyn. I found all this surprising, and others have simply refused to believe it. Should the law not have made more difference? In fact, the problem recurs throughout our subject, and it is not a matter that applies to Gortyn alone. A similar shock of recognition is felt when we realize that Athenian women, without any law authorizing such a thing, are performing transactions that get their validity from the agreement of their Kyrios; Delian women, too, are availing themselves of the Athenian woman’s freedom in small transactions, though the ‘law of the medimnus’ was peculiarly an Attic one. In the manumissions there are places where women require a Kyrios to manumit, and there are places where they do not; but the matter does not seem to affect the frequency of their manumissions. The matter, in fact, is not as surprising as all that; for there was behind Greek society a historical unity that did not exist for Greek law. The Greeks had entered Greece, Ionia, and the islands, in successive waves of invasion over a period of several hundred years; although each group had distinguishing characteristics, both in language and in culture, their speech and behaviour were mutually intelligible and had a common basis. This common basis was even more apparent within each dialectical group. Law , however, was formulated in Greek states only after they separated into independent poleis; and then each city formulated its own.law. The law was based heavily on the preexisting culture: monogamy, inheritance by proximity of relationship with males preceding females, and the structure of tribes, clans, and households, were just a few items that reappear throughout Greece, in practically every system of law we know. But law is not simply a reflection of the society that produces it; it is a systematization and rationalization. Now, the same institution may be rationalized in many different ways: inheritance, for example, can be seen merely as a way of recycling the goods of a dead man; or of regulating the leadership of a household when its leader dies; or of carrying out the wishes (or presumed wishes) of the dead; or of guaranteeing the survivors a livelihood. In some cases, there will be no practical difference whatever rationalization we adopt; in others, our understanding of the institution’s function will demand that we fit the law to our understanding, and in fact, much of a society’s legal change comes about because of new rationalizations of old institutions. If marriage is designed to build up a household, a childless marriage is not really a marriage at all; if it is designed to secure companionship for husband and wife, the presence or absence of children should not affect it. The lawmakers of the various Greek cities did not all adopt the same rationalization of their institutions. Although the institutions themselves

Patterns in Women's Economics 9] were similar throughout Greece, the understanding of them differed from place to place; the more so as they must already have diverged in many particulars by the time of the great legislators. The result of this was that the various legal codes that were built differed not only in details, but in fundamental principles, while the societies that followed them retained a great similarity. The understanding of the epiclerate in Gortyn was totally different from that in Athens, but the institution itself was remarkably similar. Tribes, on the other hand, existed in both places, but in Athens they served purely as political subdivisions, while in Gortyn they still determined a man’s choice of a bride. It is natural, in the course of time, for two developments to take place. First of all, there tends to be an internal rationalization, that is, an increasing reform of the practical law to fit the dominant principle, once that has been adopted: one may think here of the great changes that eventually had to be made in American law to fit the principles of ‘freedom of religion’ or ‘due process of law’. Secondly, there is a competition among varying forms of law, resulting eventually in the lapse of some and the spread of others, often by conquest. As the first principle operated, it will have tended to make the laws — and the societies, for society does indeed change in reaction to law — of the various Greek cities more distinctive; as the second operated, both by persuasion and conquest, it will have tended to lead to the disappearance of local laws and their replacement with others, often on the Athenian or Spartan model. In law, as in language, the period of dialects gave way to a period of koine, a common speech. But in the classical period that we have been discussing neither of these two developments was far advanced. The essential unity of Greek society, based on an ancestral unity in a period in which the society’s customs had grown up, remained strong. The laws of its various localities were clearly distinct, but since in those cases we can observe they had not yet restructed the social institutions in a way as fundamental as can happen over a period of centuries, the basic unity remains visible behind the legal diversity. The law and the individual. Among the various possible understandings of an institution, the law may choose one, compromise among many (‘freedom with responsibility’) or define an order of precedence among them (‘your rights end where his nose begins’, i.e., freedom from assault takes precedence over freedom of action). Citizens in their everyday dealings, however, are not necessarily so consistent, nor do they necessarily accept the law’s choice of principles. This is, of course, one of the major sources of employment for judges and juries; but much of the citizen’s behaviour will never get to court, whether or not it is legal. It is not true, then, that ‘women in Athens could not own property’. The case is rather that women in Athenian /aw could not own property; that is, when the

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 92 matter reached court, the property would be treated as belonging to their Kyrios. But in everyday transactions many women did in fact behave as if their property was theirs; and if the matter did not reach court, then it really does not much matter what the court might have decided about its legality. This is not to say that the law was a dead letter, for it was not; the whole body of Attic oratory shows us as much. What it does show us is the limits of any body of non-religious personal law as a determinant of personal behaviour. And it makes clear how a law can fall into disuse, when people stop thinking its violations a matter worth bringing into court. Similar statements can be made about the position of the Kyrios throughout Greece, or throughout those parts of Greece where the kyrios exercised an economic function, and they suggest themselves for other matters as well, but others will have to determine how true they are in areas outside the field of this book. Paternalism in Athens. A particular matter worth noting is the structure of the law in Athens. We have discussed it at length in every chapter of this book, but it is worth mentioning in summary if only because it is so easy to get a false picture by looking at parts of the whole. Since a woman’s sphere in life was her family, her active life did not really begin until her marriage. The marriage itself, as we saw, was arranged by her father and her prospective husband; she was simply passed from the house of one kyrios to the house of another, with some money or property going along with her as a dowry. But concomitant with the patriarchal marriage-rules was a pervasive paternalism, a solicitude for the bride’s interest that was seen in terms of family responsibility. This paternalism was based, of course, on a presumption that men were more intelligent than women — a presumption so basic to Athenian male society that they rarely bothered to state it directly, though it is possible to adduce sources.' Perhaps most interesting is the Didot papyrus, where a woman is portrayed as taking it for granted: “But you'll say I don’t understand. Maybe it’s possible that I am foolish, I won’t deny it; but, Father, if a woman hasn’t got intelligence to judge other matters, she may still have some sense about her own af-

fairs’.

It has been presumed? that such a belief would mean that women were held in contempt; since that is demonstrably not the case, as anyone knows who has read Greek tragedy or seen Greek art, the existence of the belief has been denied. But there was no need for contempt to be involved; each sex was considered to have a proper role for which it was fitted, and intelligence, beyond such understanding as was necessary to manage the day-to-day affairs of a household, was not thought necessary or desirable for the Greek woman.’ It followed from this, as well as from the inherited patriarchal family structure, that the most important deci-

Patterns in Women’s Economics 93 sions of a woman’s life were made for her, not by her. This being the case, many scholars, particularly legal scholars, have written of Athenian women as if they were treated as slaves or as objects. Thus, for example, Erdmann: ‘She was in her entire legal position actually more a part of the family property, whose worth was originally even realizable in cash by bride-purchase, than a real legal subject who could be an independent possessor of rights and responsibilities.’*> This is a very superficial view even of the epiclerate; as a general view of Athenian women’s legal position it is nonsense. Murder of a woman was punishable as murder, not as damage to her husband.® I know of no one who has ever claimed that a female citizen could legally be enslaved, or assaulted, or slandered, or that the prohibition on these would have fallen under property law. Hybris (a general charge covering serious injury or offence) was culpable against a woman as against a man; but then, so

' was hybris against a slave.’ It is always easy to believe of other people, particularly people very long ago or very far away, that they establish systems on principles of utter foolishness; but neither the epiclerate nor a hypothetical purchase-marriage (which was not the form in Athens, at any rate) should convince us that the Greek lawgivers were unaware that womien were people. Athenian men did recognize that women were people, and they were interested in their well-being; but they would not entrust to a woman the power to guarantee that welfare. Protection of women was thus expressed not through direct rights, but by a system of rights and obligations

of men. I know of no better definition of paternalism. :

The men normally responsible for looking after the woman’s welfare were, of course, the men of her family; but the law recognized that there were cases in which a woman needed protection against the men of her own family. In these cases — abuse of an epikleros, abuse of parents, divorce — or in cases where the family rights and responsibilities were themselves to be determined, as the adjudication of an epikleros, the eponymous archon took charge of the matter.® It was thus the head of her family who chose her husband for her, and though we do know of cases where the women were allowed free selection,’ these were exceptional. Normally the father, or whatever male relative had inherited his position as kyrios, would make his own choice. But, as far as we know there were only two considerations that were likely to determine his action: his daughter’s welfare, and that of his family. These two rarely conflicted in the economic sphere, for an Athenian woman’s prosperity had, as we have seen, little to do with personallyheld assets; it was rather the wife of a rich family who could be considered wealthy. This was the consideration of the father in the Didot papyrus: ‘But you (says his daughter), as you tell me, are going to give

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 94 me now to arich man, so that I shouldn’t live out my life in grief’,’® though she, a true heroine of the New Comedy, is more interested in preserving her original marriage with the man she loves. Demosthenes attacks Meidias by describing his ostentation: ‘He built a house in Eleusis so big that it overshadows everything in the place, and he takes his wife to the mysteries, or anywhere else she wants, with his white Sicyonian team, and he himself swaggers around the agora with three or four attendants, naming funnels and demi-tasse and saucers so that passersby can hear.’'! If Meidias’ wife lived in luxury in the house at Eleusis, if she was driven around with the Sicyonian team, it was not by virtue of her personal wealth, but by her having married a rich man. It was also on the basis of her husband’s wealth that liturgies were performed in her name, as was noted above. Marriage into a rich house could, of course, have its disadvantages. Demosthenes accused Apollodorus of high living in terms very different from those employed against Meidias: ‘Now you wear a wool coat, and you free one hetaera, and give a dowry to another — and this when you have a wife — and you go around with three boys for your attendants, and live wildly for all to see’,’? and Alcibiades’ wife, who had to put up with even worse abuse, does not seem to have been made happy by her husband’s wealth. But even against her husband, a woman was always dependent upon her family: mistreated by Alcibiades, she went to her brother for protection.'> Demosthenes tells a similar story about Aristogeiton: ‘and in addition to not keeping his hands off his mother, as you just heard from the witnesses, he also put his own sister — not by the same father; she was his mother’s daughter, whom she had given birth to somehow (I'll pass over that), but his sister nevertheless — he put her out for prostitution, according to the charge of the suit, which that excellent brother, the one who is now pleading for him, brought against him on their behalf.’ ‘* Here we are dealing with a half-sister, not a wife, and with a story rather less likely than that of Alcibiades’ wife; but it is still notable that the girl’s protection against her brother was another brother. It is possible to argue that the paternalism of Athenian law and society was no more than a cloak surrounding the patriarchy, and that the society itself was truly designed for the exclusive benefit of its male members. Such an argument, I think, would be more valid in a contemporary situation than it would be for ancient Athens. For Athens had no need of a cloak; the patriarchy of the law and the society was completely unchallenged. Efforts have been made to invent a Greek ‘feminist movement’ out of such works as the Lysistrata and the Medea, but there is nothing to indicate that the Athenians saw them that way: the Lysistrata no more makes a ‘comic proposal’ that the city be turned over to the women than the Birds makes a ‘comic proposal’ that a city be foun-

Patterns in Women’s Economics 95 ded by Birds, or the Peace a ‘comic proposal’ that peace-loving Athenians should fly to heaven on dung-beetles. Athenian patriarchy was extremely stable, and indeed survived for centuries in spite of great political upheavals. Nobody tried to hide it. The paternalistic interest which we find throughout was rather the result of the patriarchy, or perhaps we should say that the two went hand in hand: once the women had no power of their own, it was only the men of their family who could guard their interests. And since their relationship with their husbands and fathers was not, in general, an adversary relationship, the men usually did so. This arrangement was not without benefit for the woman: her modesty was not infringed by the necessity of transacting her business in person. her position within the family was guaranteed and respected, and her larger economic affairs were, or were supposed to be, managed, or mismanaged, for her. Few women today would consider this adequate recompense for the loss of their independence; but it is unlikely that the women of Athens put the same value on independence, which was considered by the men, at least, a trait more proper to a hetaera than to a respectable woman. Perhaps more to the point, it has become clear from the previous chapters that for all the legal and social paternalism, those women who were in a position to be independent — women with large dowries and rich epikleroi — did indeed dominate their families’ economic lives just as they would have if their money had been their own. In their case we glimpse what it was that made the patriarchy so stable: the patriarchy existed, for these women, only when they chose to call upon it. If they did not wish to be bothered with the day-to-day management of the farm, well, that was their husbands’ business; but if he wanted to sell it, or did not want to sell it when she did, he had a powerful opponent. On the — Other side of the economic scale, where the women who worked for a living as the men did, there was a similar practical equality in spite of legal distinctions; and while we may surmise that in Athens, as at other places and times, it was in the middle classes that the pressure to conform to the society’s ideal was strongest, there is no reason to believe that the law that was so flexible for other women was ironclad for the moderately comfortable. Now, in a society whose laws are written, but whose women are largely illiterate, the women will tend to be more interested in the actual situation than the legal one, while the men will often show a reversed priority. We are all familiar from popular literature with the man whose wife agrees calmly to all his pronouncements of principle — he is the head of the family, he will have the final decision, he will make up his own mind — and then watches him accede to her practical advice. When both man and wife have undergone the same education, this situation can only be viewed as one with a winner and a loser, but which is which will depend

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 96 upon whether we are more interested in abstract principle or in concrete decision. When the man has been educated to think in abstracts and the woman has not, each leaves this discussion perfectly satisfied: the man has won his abstract points, the woman her concrete one. In Athenian society, the situation was similar. The society was an extremely patriarchal one in theory, not only legal theory but the generally accepted social understanding of the people. However, in day-to-day actions, aS we saw, the patriarchal structure may have counted less than the particular resources of the individuals involved: here the women could hold their own with the men, if their economic and social standing permitted it. The men were satisfied with the situation; although they recognized that a rich woman was not dominated by her husband, they did not thereby think that the patriarchy was endangered. The women have not left us their opinion; but it is possible (though it need not be the case) that the stability of the system indicates that they were satisfied with their practical abilities, and willing to accept the theoretical disabilities. Occasionally, of course — and particularly in the law courts — these could become painfully real; but as long as they did not, the women may have been willing to accept severe restrictions outside of the family in return for importance and idealization within it. Patterns in Greece at large. While women’s economic role was always a limited one, there was no movement to restrict it further: their rights to inherit, such as they were, were never abridged, nor was their freedom to manage small amounts of money tampered with. But was there any movement in the other direction? The evidence of the papyri, coming from outside Greece and not dealt with in this book, has led scholars to believe that there was a material change in the economic position of women in the Hellenistic age, in which women became much more prominent in the larger dealings of economic life.'® This certainly appears to have been the case for those Greek women who went to Egypt, whence the papyri come; but there are few traces of it in the documents of Greece proper. Much of this lack may be due to the nature of our documents, which rarely extend over a period of time long enough to show any development. It is true that most of the individual inscriptions in which we find women transacting important business date from the later Hellenistic period; but since the nonAthenian documents are much more abundant for these years than for the earlier centuries, we may have no more than an accident of preservation. The only concrete evidence of change that we have is in the Delos inscriptions, where the women clearly became more active at the close of the Hellenistic era. It is surprising to see the change come so late, particularly in as cosmopolitan a place as Delos; and we may perhaps have an indication that the changes in the condition of women took place

Patterns in Women’s Economics 97 first outside of Greece — possibly because of contact with foreign cultures, or the conditions of settlement — and spread only later to the mainland and the islands. Within Greece, our geographical information is very patchy. We know much about Athens and about Gortyn, and we know something about Lacedaemon, Delphi, and Delos. Documentation for the rest of Greece varies from poor to nonexistent. Perhaps the only generalization worth making is that as the limitations placed on the woman’s external activity both by the law and by the culture were intimately connected with her role in the family, these limitations tended to disappear in other contexts. The greater independence of Spartan and Gortynian women is certainly connected with the dominance of communal institutions in these places; the dependence of the Athenian woman, on the other hand, is surely connected with the strength of the Athenian family. The members of the Athenian family were much more interdependent than the members of a family in Sparta or Gortyn, where the communal institutions, segregated by sex, had prospered at the expense of the family; we may suspect, on the other side of the coin, that the Athenian woman who occupied herself with her household had a larger and more respected function than a Spartan woman who did likewise. Where the family was a less important unit, it ceased to dominate the lives of men or women as thoroughly as it did in Athens; and the law of Gortyn came to reflect the difference.’® When trying to gauge the direction in which Greek society was moving, it is important to remember that we know very little about the protoGreek state of affairs. To what extent the principles of Athenian family organization were either innovation or archaism is, in the present state of our knowledge, impossible to determine. The scholar who would deal with ‘origins’ must remember that the proto-Greeks were not simple; if there are universal characteristics of a primitive society, the Greeks were separated from them not by decades, but by millennia. He must also remember that an institution is not necessarily old because it is obsolete, or new because it is vigorous. In my introduction, I asked what a woman did in ancient Greece, and indicated that I would deal only with part of the question. Many matters remain to be investigated. For example, the early upbringing of children, the management of domestic slaves, and the production of food and clothing were matters of great importance to Greek women; each deserves more than a few paragraphs in a general ‘story of the Greek woman’, which is what they have hitherto been given. For other questions, I am not even sure that the material exists to answer them: What was a Greek woman’s cultural universe? Was it the same as the men’s? Was it based on literature or on stories or on gossip? What in the world was an Athenian girl doing during the years ‘indoors’ before she was married?

Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece 98 Scholars thus far have not succeeded either in building an independent history of women or in integrating women into the general fabric of Greek history. The latter goal, I believe, is hopeless; what we know about Greek women indicates that they had precious little traceable effect on the wars and reigns that we call ‘history’; nor can those women who did be said to represent the true history of women. But the former, too, is not going to be an easy task. Because of the nature of women’s world, lines of causality are very different in it from those in the men’s world. The traditions of individual families count for much more, and the vagaries of outside society for much less, than they do in men’s history. To deal properly with women’s history, we will need an open mind as to what constitutes ‘history’, for it surely will not be wars and reigns. We will need an open mind about periodization: is there a ‘Renaissance * period’ of women’s history after the ‘mediaeval period’? I have, throughout the book, avoided the common debate on the ‘status’ of Greek women, whether it was ‘high’ or ‘low’. They had, in Greek society, the status of women: this was a status distinct from that of men, or children, or slaves, and our purpose must be to determine what that status was and to try to understand the people who lived with it, and who made of it an honourable or a dishonourable estate by their own actions and experiences. We must examine the matter in all its subtleties and complexities, and see it in a historical perspective. We must ask not, ‘What was her status?’ but rather, ‘How did this aspect come to coincide with that one? How. did they develop out of the previous state? What effect did they have on succeeding generations?’ There is no shortcut to understanding.

Appendix I : Size of Dowries The following table will indicate the range of attested dowries, as well as the discrepancies among the sources:

Source? _ aky oO 05 55 $ §6S”ES &§

S686 § S&S FS Amount ofDowry'’